Last fall, Dr. Raymond V. Damadian was denied a Nobel Prize for his role in the development of magnetic resonance imaging. But he won a consolation prize last week, when the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia recognized his business acumen in making the idea profitable.
Dr. Damadian, the president of Fonar Inc. of Melville, N.Y., a manufacturer of M.R.I. machines, complained loudly and publicly after the Nobel Prize in Medicine last year, recognizing ''discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging,'' went to Dr. Paul C. Lauterbur of the University of Illinois and Sir Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham in England.
In a series of full-page advertisements in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, Dr. Damadian declared that he took the crucial first steps in adapting magnetic resonance for medical scans back in the 1970's and that he should have been recognized for them. The advertisements, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, showed a Nobel medal turned upside down and called the omission ''the shameful wrong that must be righted.''
On Thursday, the Franklin Institute, the science museum in Philadelphia, bestowed one of its two annual Bower Awards on Dr. Damadian. Each year, the awards -- one for science and one for business leadership -- focus on a different research field. This year, the field is brain research.
''There is no controversy in this,'' said Dr. Bradford A. Jameson, a professor of biochemistry at Drexel University who was the chairman of the committee that chose the winners. ''If you look at the patents in this field, they're his.''
Continue reading the main storyDr. Damadian, 68, said that he was honored by the award and that the Nobel dispute no longer concerned him. ''I put that issue behind me, and I don't want to much talk about it,'' he said.
But he added: ''I made the original contribution and made the first patent. If people want to reconsider history apart from the facts, there's not much that I can do about that.''
Because a Nobel can be awarded to as many as three living people, the Nobel committee's exclusion of Dr. Damadian appeared to be a pointed decision that his contributions were not worthy of a prize.
Further complicating the case are Dr. Damadian's beliefs, following a strict reading of the Bible, that the universe, the earth and life were created in six days about 6,000 years ago. Some of his supporters say the Nobel committee shunned him not for scientific reasons but to avoid giving credence to creation science.
Nobel officials say Dr. Damadian's beliefs played no role in their decision. Details of Nobel deliberations are sealed for 50 years.
Officials at the Franklin Institute said the decision on the Bower prize was independent of the Nobel controversy.
''It's not a scientific award per se,'' said Dr. Philip W. Hammer, a vice president of the institute.
The committee, Dr. Hammer said, began its deliberations last spring and settled on Dr. Damadian just after the Nobel announcement and before the advertisements started appearing. The award, he said, recognizes Dr. Damadian for ''taking amazing technology that he has legitimate claim for inventing and taking that technology to market successfully.''
Magnetic resonance uses radio signals emitted by water molecules in the body to construct three-dimensional images of internal tissues and organs.
Chemists and physicists had used magnetic resonance since the 1940's in analyzing chemicals. Dr. Damadian thought that magnetic resonance could distinguish normal tissues from cancerous ones and, in 1971, published an article in the journal Science saying that. Because different types of normal tissue also vary widely in their responses to magnetic resonance, that has not proved to be a useful diagnostic technique. Dr. Damadian was granted a patent in 1974 for the idea of magnetic resonance scanners.
Meanwhile, Dr. Lauterbur, then at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, developed the technique for producing images from magnetic resonance scans and published a paper in Nature that showed the first M.R.I. images. In his notes, Dr. Lauterbur acknowledged that he had been inspired by Dr. Damadian's work.
Dr. Mansfield refined the techniques, making them more practical.
Dr. Damadian built the first machine for medical M.R.I. scanning in 1977 and named it Indomitable, producing the first images of a human subject, his assistant Larry Minkoff. That machine is now at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution.
In 1978, he founded Fonar, which started selling commercial M.R.I. machines two years later. In 1997, the Supreme Court found that General Electric, one of the largest makers of M.R.I. machines, had infringed his 1974 patent, and it paid Dr. Damadian $129 million.
Dr. Jameson, the head of the Franklin Award committee, said it had ''stayed out of the scientific fray.''
Regardless of who should receive the scientific credit, Dr. Damadian ''reduced it to practice,'' he said, adding:
''And a lot of people's lives have changed because of it. Everybody thought this was a very significant contribution Damadian had made and had not been recognized.''
Of the Nobel controversy, Dr. Jameson said: ''I don't think it's black and white. Damadian clearly contributed to the science. I could make an argument why he deserved to share in the Nobel Prize.''
Still, in 1990, when the Franklin Institute bestowed a Bower Award for the science of magnetic resonance imaging, it honored Dr. Lauterbur, not Dr. Damadian. Unlike the Nobel committee, the Franklin does not split its prizes, so the seeming implication was that Dr. Lauterbur's scientific contributions were more important than Dr. Damadian's.
''Yes,'' Dr. Jameson said, ''I guess that's an accurate statement.''
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