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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."

Damadian had grown up in a church-going family and was president of the church youth group. But he had never made a personal commitment to Christ.

A week after he graduated from medical school, Raymond and Donna married. Then it was a year's residency at Kings County Hospital in New York, a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, and then on to Harvard University for postdoctorate work. After two years in the Air Force, Damadian joined the faculty of the State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences Center in Brooklyn, eventually becoming associate professor of biophysics and internal medicine.

Bigger plans In 1969, Damadian had opportunities to use a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer in his biophysics research. It was a technology discovered in the 1940s but had been limited to experimental use because nothing larger than a pencil could be placed within the circular magnet. Working with the device, Damadian had an idea: if you build an NMR large enough to scan a human body, it could help detect cancer cells.

It was like "going from a paper glider to a 747," he says now. In June 1970, Damadian conducted further experiments with rats—healthy and cancerous—on the small NMR to see if the machine could differentiate between the cells. It could. Aware of the magnitude of his discovery, Damadian set his sights on building a large-scale scanner that would perform magnetic resonance imaging.

When he published his findings in 1971, the race to develop the first MRI scanner began. Damadian assembled a small staff to help him. Knowing that other scientists and corporations were trying to do the same thing, Damadian pushed himself and the staff to the breaking point.

"I wanted to build this machine, and I wanted to be the first." After six years of intense, exhausting work, Damadian's team succeeded. The world's first human scan was made on July 3, 1977. But the toll it took on Damadian's faith was almost unrecoverable.

Work is my god Little by little, Damadian had abandoned God. "I thought of myself as a good, responsible, productive person interested in the welfare of humanity," he says. "Therefore I was a good person who had no need for God."

Working in the aggressively secular environment of academics and science where "God wasn't necessary" did considerable damage. "That thinking becomes the root of atheism, and it got hold of me."

At the same time, Damadian was consumed with his work, putting in such long hours that he saw little of his wife, two sons, and daughter.

Problems at home mushroomed out of control, an issue on which he doesn't like to go into detail.

Looking back, Damadian recognizes that he had failed to spiritually lead his family—and stole their time for his work.

"I was not living up to the responsibility of being the priest of the household. I was supplying negligible spiritual direction. I didn't read the Bible, and didn't read it with my family or pray. I was consumed by my work."

He knew that something drastic needed to be done—and quickly—to preserve his family. But he had no answers.

"About the time I did the first human scan, my father said to me, 'You may think you don't need God, but your children do need him.' Those words became a turning point for me, because I realized I was in a situation I couldn't control."

Damadian's father-in-law introduced him to a pastor who put him in touch with Gary Lefevre, a former Canadian football star who ran a camp in Alberta. Damadian spent two invigorating weeks with Lefevre, talking about the Bible and the role faith played in the athlete's life. It was life-changing for Damadian.

"Gary expanded my knowledge of the Scriptures. In my work I felt reasonably confident I could judge whether something was true if I had all the facts. But since I hadn't read or studied the Bible, I went largely on hearsay. I definitely knew what Jesus was saying in Matthew 22:29: 'You err because you don't know the Scriptures.'"

Prayer changes things The family crisis didn't disappear overnight, and Damadian's faith wasn't fanned into full flame. But things began to change for the better, he says. "Once I was driven to my knees in prayer, things started to happen."

Damadian and his wife eventually read the Bible cover to cover several times together. "I don't know what it's like for people in other professions, but for the scientific mind, the Bible is wonderful if you read it from start to finish. It fits together with an astonishing consistency, which was the opposite of my secular perception. My early impressions were that it was rife with contradictions."

In 1978, Damadian founded his own company to produce MRIs, introducing the first scanner to the medical industry in 1980. The company, Fonar Corp., in Melville, Long Island, "was bathed in prayer from the start. From the first day we were in business, six of the largest corporations in the world began taking everything we produced, copying it, putting it on their machines and selling it as their own."

Fonar continued producing MRIs while it battled corporate giants in court over patent infringements. In 1995, Hitachi settled out of court for an undisclosed sum on the eve of a trial. The same year Fonar won a $69 million judgment against General Electric. Fonar now employs 350 people. Each day about 40 employees attend a voluntary prayer meeting to uphold the company in the multi-billion dollar MRI market.

"Once the court decided in our favor, we had concrete proof of where the technology and innovations came from," Damadian says. "So now people are looking to us for innovations and improvements."

Damadian's goal is to get the cost of his MRIs down to about $300,000 from the current $650,000 to $850,000 so "everyone could afford to have one if needed," he says. While he is grateful for the success of his company, Damadian is more grateful for his family and for having the Lord at the head of his household.

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