INNER SPACE
Today, MRIs and other imaging technologies are so commonplace that it’s easy to forget how miraculous they were when it first became possible to see inside the human body.
LOOK BUT DON’T TOUCH
In 1969 Dr. Raymond Damadian, an assistant professor at the State University of New York, visited the lab of a U.S. Navy physicist named Freeman Cope and got a demonstration of an unusual method Cope used to study materials in test tubes. Instead of working with the materials directly, Cope inserted the test tubes into an electromagnet and bombarded them with energy. When the electromagnet was turned on, the sample in the test tube absorbed energy. Then, when the magnet was turned off, the sample released the energy in the form of electromagnetic waves. An antenna built around the test tube received these signals, and by studying the signals, Cope was able to analyze the molecular structure of his samples in great detail, without ever touching the samples physically.
The technique had been used by physicists in labs since the 1940s, but it was new to Damadian. He had been trained as a physician, and he thought the technique might be useful in medicine as well. What if the test tube and the electromagnet surrounding it were large enough to hold an entire person? “I said, ‘Cope, I can’t believe what you just did. You took a sample with an antenna around the outside of the test tube and got all this detailed chemical information.’ I said, ‘Do you realize, that if we could ever do that on a human body, we could get chemistry from anywhere in the body, we could spark an unprecedented revolution in human medicine.’ Well,” Damadian told the BBC in 2018, “he thought that was crazy.”
But Damadian was convinced the idea had merit. So he and two of his SUNY graduate students, Larry Minkoff and Mike Goldsmith, spent the next several years building a device large enough to scan an entire human being. They wrapped the outside of a large cylinder with 30 miles of niobium-titanium wire to create the electromagnet, then they added a liquid helium cooling system to keep the wire cool, which made the magnet even more powerful. Because the machine could only focus on one particular point in space, Damadian and his students also built a sliding wooden frame for the person being scanned to lie on. Adjusting the frame while the patient was on it made it possible to scan different parts of the body, by moving each part into the focus point. Mike Goldsmith designed the receiving antenna: instead of building it into the machine, which is how modern MRI scanners work, Goldsmith’s antenna wrapped around the patient and was worn like a corset.
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By 1977 the machine, which they named “Indomitable” because of all the technological and other obstacles they’d overcome to build it, was complete and ready to be tested. There was just one problem: nobody wanted to get in it. As far as Damadian and his grad students could tell, there was no risk associated with exposure to large electromagnetic fields. But no one had ever stuffed themselves inside such a powerful electromagnetic field before, so who really knew? Damadian finally decided that since the machine was his idea, he would have to be the one to climb inside it. He strapped on the antenna and got inside the machine; then his grad students turned it on and tried to scan him. No luck—the machine did not produce any readings. They weren’t sure what the problem was…until someone suggested, diplomatically, that maybe Dr. Damadian was too fat for the antenna, which wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up the signals after they passed through his body fat.
The only way to test this theory was to scan someone who was skinnier than Damadian. Larry Minkoff was a lot skinnier, but he refused to do it. Finally, after seven weeks of watching Damadian closely and observing no apparent ill effects from the scan, on July 3, 1977, Minkoff worked up the nerve to put on the antenna and climb into the machine. “We put Larry in, we got a signal immediately from his heart, and I said, ‘Holy smokes! It’s actually going to work,’ ” Damadian told the BBC.
When the wooden frame was positioned to scan Minkoff’s heart, it detected large amounts of water, which is present in large quantities in the blood that is pumped through the heart. When Damadian moved the frame so that Minkoff’s lungs were in position to be scanned, the signal indicating the presence of water faded to almost nothing—exactly what he expected it to do, because the lungs contain much less blood than the heart. Over the next five hours, Damadian collected data from 106 different points on Minkoff’s body, including his liver and spinal cord, which the computer then used to construct into a crude image.
SEEING THINGS DIFFERENTLY
Damadian’s machine was the first MRI machine large enough to scan an entire person, and the image the Indomitable’s computer created from the 106 different data points it scanned that day was the first MRI scan of a human being. But the technology that it used, analyzing the signals from hydrogen cells, turned out to be a dead end. Damadian assumed that the signals given off from cancerous tissues would be different enough from the signals given off by healthy tissue to enable his scanner to be used to detect cancer. He was wrong—signals given off by different parts of the body varied so much that it was difficult to tell which cells were cancerous. But Damadian’s work inspired another scientist, a chemistry professor at Stony Brook University named Paul Lauterbur, to develop his own MRI scanning technique, which used two magnetic fields—a strong one and a weak one—to create two-dimensional images of the tissue being scanned.
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BLIND SPOT
That method of scanning proved to be a much more effective diagnostic tool. Then an English scientist named Peter Mansfield improved upon Lauterbur’s technique, coming up with a way to scan patients in minutes instead of hours. Their machines were so far superior to Damadian’s first machine that when Damadian started his own company to build MRI machines in the 1980s, he abandoned his own designs in favor of Lauterbur’s and Mansfield’s. Their contributions to the development of the MRI were so significant that when the Nobel Committee decided to award the inventors of the MRI scanner with the 2003 Nobel Prize for Medicine, they awarded it to Lauterbur and Mansfield, but not to Damadian.
The slight was controversial, and it made Damadian so angry that he took out full-page ads in the New York Times and other papers protesting the decision. But there’s no way to appeal a Nobel Prize decision, and though there’s nothing to stop the Nobel Committee from honoring Damadian in a subsequent year, as of 2018 they have not done so, and he still hasn’t received the Nobel Prize that he feels he deserves. “I made the original contribution and made the first patent,” he told the New York Times in 2004. “If people want to reconsider history apart from the facts, there’s not much I can do about that.”
A TIP FROM UNCLE JOHN
Claustrophobia, a fear of small spaces, can strike during an MRI session, not only because you’re in such a small space, but also because you’re worried about a possible major medical problem. Here are some ways to reduce the panic:
1.Try focused breathing—breathe in for five seconds, then out, then repeat.
2.Just simply count. Monotony can be soothing.
3.Even covering your face with a towel or washcloth can make you feel like you’re someplace else… anyplace else.
WHY DO AUCTIONEERS SPEAK SO QUICKLY?
“They talk like that to hypnotize the bidders. Auctioneers don’t just talk fast—they chant in a rhythmic monotone to lull onlookers into a conditioned pattern of call and response, as if they were playing a game of ‘Simon Says.’ The speed is also intended to give the buyers a sense of urgency: Bid now or lose out. And it doesn’t hurt the bottom line, either. Auctioneers typically take home from 10 to 20 percent of the sale price. Selling more items in less time means they make more money.”
—Slate
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