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RAYMOND V. DAMADIAN, MD
President and Chairman
FONAR Corporation
Melville, New York

The 2004 Bower Award for Business Leadership
Ever since the ancient Chinese and Greeks independently discovered that the mineral magnetite attracted iron, the use of magnetism has had countless practical applications for humankind.  One such application had its genesis in a laboratory at Columbia University.  Here, a discovery was made in 1930 that Raymond Damadian would one day apply to revolutionize science and medicine.  His discovery was the development and commercialization of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) used in clinical applications today.

Columbia physicists had discovered that magnetic fields and radio waves cause the nuclei in  atoms to give off tiny radio signals. This discovery, known as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR),  was used for decades to probe the nature of chemical compounds. Not until 1969, however, did anyone dream of using this tool to scan the body for disease. That someone was Damadian, who was inspired to find a device to detect disease early, having lost a grandmother to breast cancer.

He thought about nuclear magnetic resonance and about the fact that the nuclei in atoms give off radio signals. Knowing that water is abundant in living tissue and that tumors contain more water than healthy tissue, he had a hunch that the radio signals from the hydrogen nuclei in cancerous tissue might differ from the signals in healthy tissue.

Damadian initiated a research study with mice and learned that he was right. In fact, the difference was dramatic! He published the results of his research in 1971 and was awarded a patent on February 5, 1974, for an "Apparatus and Method of Detecting Cancer in Tissue." It was the world's first patent issued in the field of MRI.

According to Damadian, the MRI is nothing more than radio signals from the atoms in our body. Our body is comprised of billions of atoms, he explains. Each of these atoms puts out a signal of its own frequency,  just like our favorite radio station.

The atomic broadcast thus allows physicians to visualize what is going on in our bodies in a non-invasive manner. From analyzing the signals in depth, they can detect the presence of disease or, better yet, the absence of disease.

Soon after receiving his patent, Damadian and his graduate students built a large-scale bodysize scanner that they nicknamed "The Indomitable." This endeavor launched the modern revolution in medical imaging, as we know it today. Although skeptics scoffed at the device in the 1970s, Damadian forged ahead. He founded the FONAR Corporation in 1978, and two years later produced the first commercial MRI machine. Today, Damadian holds 45 patents for improvements in his MRI scanner.

Successive generations of scanners offer a variety of options, based on need. A Stand-Up MRI introduced in 1996, for example, is the world's only whole-body MRI scanner with the ability to perform Position Imaging. This scanner allows patients to be imaged standing, sitting, bending, or lying down. With its unique ability to scan patients in weight-bearing postures, this MRI has identified pathologies that had gone undetected on conventional, lie-down MRI scanners. This stand-up model comes complete with a 42-inch TV to help distract patients during the 15-minute scan.

Incredibly, Damadian and his team are also developing a room-size MRI. This model, OR-360, is big enough for an entire surgical team and equipment. It will allow surgeons to operate without obstruction inside the scanner's magnet, capitalizing on the MRI's exceptional soft tissue detail to guide their surgery.

"The ability of the MRI to allow us to perform neurosurgical procedures on the brain with image guidance gives us the ability to use smaller instruments, introduce catheters directly, introduce an agent, and look for the response that will show us that we are shrinking the tumor," Damadian says.

Damadian's vision for the potential of MRI goes far beyond current applications. One of the weaknesses of medicine, he says, is that the results of treatment cannot be measured with any accuracy. MNR offers the precision to do that. He foresees the day when physicians will be able to use this technology to track the effectiveness of an anti-cancer drug by looking at cancer cells, for example, or to monitor the effectiveness of a depression medication by observing changes in brain cells. Overall, he suspects that MNR has only begun to change the quality of
our lives.

Headquartered on Long Island, N.Y. with more than 500 employees, the FONAR Corporation has installed 300 MRI scanners worldwide, including installations in Europe, India, China, Korea, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico.

Although his company has developed an extraordinary tool for diagnosing brain tumors and other diseases of the central nervous system, Damadian makes it clear that there were so many others around him who helped to make it all happen.

"It's not just me," he says. "We have a team of very talented, imaginative, and capable engineers who are coming up with ideas all the time."

Most specifically, however, he credits the support of his wife, Donna. He says that without Donna covering for him at home with their three children while he worked late in the lab, there could well be no MRI today.

Damadian was born in Forest Hills, NY in 1936 and attended the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied violin for eight years from 1944 through 1952. At age 16, he won a Ford Foundation Scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, where he graduated with a B.S. in mathematics in 1956. He received his M.D. from Albert Einstein School of Medicine of Yeshiva University, in 1960. After graduation, Damadian joined the faculty of the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, in Brooklyn, where he served as associate professor of
medicine and biophysics. It was here that he first considered using NMR as a diagnostic tool in medicine.

Damadian received the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan in 1988 and the following year was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He has received many other honors, as well, including the Lemelson-MIT Program's Lifetime Achievement Award.

"The Indomitable" now sits in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. More than 60 million MRIs are performed each year around the world.