Guests: Dr. Raymond Damadian, Doug Sharp, Rich Geer
Description: Dr. Raymond Damadian explains the research and experiments that led up to the invention of the MRI. His book “Gifted Mind” tells the story. One of the mysteries of life is the fact that while an organism is alive, each cell generates a voltage. It is this battery that keeps it alive. It was postulated that a process existed in the cell that pumps potassium ions in and sodium ions out. One of his professors explained that the person who isolates this “sodium pump” would win the Nobel Prize. Dr. Damadian set out to do just that. But, after many months of research, he concluded that this pump didn’t exist. This was published in a paper called “The Caloric Catastrophe”. He and his colleague Dr. Larry Minkoff concluded that the voltage was caused by ion exchange. He was persuaded by a professor who read his paper to use NMR to prove his ideas. Ultimately this led to the idea that the NMR technology (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) could be expanded to the point that a scanner could be built so that a person could fit inside and it could identify cancer cells.