By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 10, 2003; Page C01

As the Nobels have been unveiled all week, reporters have been calling up laureates every day and asking where they were when they heard the news, and how does it feel to be a winner. But what about the losers? Where were they and how did it feel?

Raymond Damadian was at his computer at home on Long Island at 5:30 Monday morning, logging on to the Nobel Foundation Web site. This was the precise moment when the prize for medicine was to be announced. And there it was: He immediately saw that the work being honored was magnetic resonance imaging -- MRI -- his field! He knew from colleagues that he had been nominated for the prize this year, and several previous years.

He checked the names of the winners.

"I went from my computer into my bedroom," Damadian said yesterday. "My wife said, 'What happened?' I said they gave it to [Paul C.] Lauterbur and [Sir Peter] Mansfield and they left me out."

How did that moment feel?

A pause.

"Agony," he recalled. "I know the outcome of this is to be written out of history altogether."

He tuned out the inevitable media reports of Lauterbur and Mansfield savoring their own personal leaps into history. "It was too much for me to bear."

But unlike most Nobel also-rans, Damadian is not giving up so easily. Yesterday his MRI manufacturing company on Long Island, Fonar Corp., took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post headlined "The Shameful Wrong That Must Be Righted."

It quoted scientists saying he was robbed. It quoted textbooks attesting to his contribution to the now ubiquitous technology -- 60 million MRI exams were given last year -- that employs high-powered magnets and radio waves to produce images of soft tissue inside the body that once was invisible to doctors unless they cut open the patient.

The ad charged that "inexcusable disregard for the truth has led the [Nobel] committee to make a decision that is simply outrageous," and it provided a clip-out form for supporters to mail protests directly to the Nobel arbiters in Stockholm.

Such ads in the Post typically cost just over $80,000, and Damadian said he will place more in other newspapers.

It's one physician-inventor's campaign to get his name added to the award for medicine before it is officially presented later this year.

"I know that had I never been born, there would be no MRI today," Damadian said.

Nobel selections often result in jealousy and hurt feelings, but a public crusade is rare.

"Usually they don't advertise and usually they don't ask everyone to write us," said Hans Jornvall, secretary of the 50-member Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, which picks the winner in medicine, speaking from Sweden.

He said Nobel officials never comment on Nobel Prize losers.

"To us," he said, "mankind is divided into two groups of people: those who have got the award and those who have still not got it. . . . The ones who have still not got it we don't say anything about."

Of those who got it, Lauterbur -- at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -- and Mansfield -- at the University of Nottingham -- Jornvall said: "We think they are excellent laureates."

The Nobel Assembly's statement on the winners said Lauterbur and Mansfield "made seminal discoveries" that "led to the development of modern magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, which represents a breakthrough in medical diagnostics and research."

Scientists in the MRI community are not totally surprised by Damadian's protest. Some said Damadian has always been bold in seeking recognition and has pined for a Nobel Prize. But there are varying views in the scientific community about the proper distribution of credit for developing MRI.

"We are perplexed, disappointed and angry about the incomprehensible exclusion" of Damadian from the prize, said Eugene Feigelson, dean of the college of medicine at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, where Damadian did his work related to MRI. "MRI's entire development rests on the shoulders of Damadian's discovery. . . . "

Damadian's discovery, beginning with experiments in 1969, was that cancerous and normal tissue could be distinguished using a precursor technology then known as nuclear magnetic resonance. In 1977 he developed a scanning machine, called "Indomitable," now owned by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and on loan to an inventors' hall of fame in Ohio.

Working separately in subsequent years, Lauterbur and Mansfield developed more sophisticated methods to capture images of tissue that were clearer, quicker and easier to use.

"In my opinion, Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield deserve the Nobel Prize," said Alex Pines, an expert in nuclear magnetic resonance at the University of California at Berkeley. "In a leap of creative genius, they came up with the gradient imaging methodology that forms the basis for what today is known as MRI."

Damadian's camp characterizes Lauterbur's and Mansfield's work as technological refinements of Damadian's central insight, while the Nobel Assembly and other scientists say Lauterbur's and Mansfield's breakthroughs were "discoveries" in their own right. The documentation that the assembly used to choose Lauterbur and Mansfield -- and exclude anyone else -- will remain secret for 50 years, under Nobel rules, Jornvall said.

Mansfield could not be reached for comment, and Lauterbur said through his wife that he preferred not to comment on Damadian's claims.

Damadian, 67, grew up in Queens and became a varsity tennis player and an accomplished violinist before getting a medical degree. When he was a boy, his grandmother was dying of cancer in the family's home, and her moans kept him awake at night. Later, as a specialist in internal medicine, he was frustrated that patients could have cancers that were undetectable -- and, doing research with mouse tumors and magnets, he hit on his big idea.

He knows his campaign to get a Nobel this year may be a long shot. Once winners have been announced, the assembly never changes its mind, according to Jornvall.

But Damadian says the battle is bigger than he is. In his view, the Nobel Assembly has become the great arbiter of who goes down in the annals of medicine -- yet its judgments are accountable to no one and not subject to appeal.

His campaign is on behalf of all the losers history might forget.

Staff writer Rick Weiss contributed to this report.