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With the announcement of the 2003 Nobel Prize for medicine, a longtime debate in the scientific community was brought to public attention. On October 6, two scientists—Paul C. Lauterbur of the University of Illinois and British citizen Sir Peter Mansfield—were awarded the Nobel Prize for developing the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine. But another scientist, Raymond Damadian, who also played a major part in the creation of MRI, was not honored. Some sources speculate it was because of Damadian's religious beliefs. Here, in a 1997 Christian Reader article, we profile Raymond Damadian's scientific and spiritual journeys. (updated October 10, 2003)

Raymond Damadian had many options as a young man: he was a skilled enough violinist to enter the Juilliard School of Music, athletic enough in tennis to compete in Junior Davis Cup events. But he also had a keen interest in medicine sparked by the drawn-out suffering his maternal grandmother experienced from cancer.

"I watched the cancer get progressively more foul, and for months after she died, I could still hear the moaning," he says.

What he didn't envision was being the inventor of a device that revolutionized medicine—the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, which opens the living body to noninvasive diagnosis. Or that President Ronald Reagan would award him the National Medal of Technology for his invention or that he would be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, alongside such men as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.

At age fifteen, Damadian received a Ford Foundation scholarship and began studies at the University of Wisconsin where he majored in math and minored in chemistry. By the end of his sophomore year, he had decided on medical school, and after graduation, began his studies at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York City.

During his first year, Damadian found himself being more interested in finding the cause, not amelioration, of disease. At the urging of one of his professors, Damadian concentrated on research.

During the summer of that year, Damadian met Donna Terry, who worked at a soda fountain close to the exclusive hotel where he was teaching tennis. Donna invited Damadian to the 1957 Billy Graham crusade at Madison Square Garden. Sitting in the balcony so far from the stage that they could hardly see the evangelist didn't prevent Damadian from hearing his message and responding to the altar call.

"I felt that what he was saying—that the Scripture presents an unequivocal mandate to be born again—was so. I hadn't dealt with that in an explicitly conscious way."

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