2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine

[digambara]

Definitely an immense clinical relevance for the work that was honored this year - discovery of MRI:

"In the beginning of the 1970s, this year?s Nobel Laureates made pioneering contributions, which later led to the applications of magnetic resonance in medical imaging."

Paul Lauterbur (born 1929), Urbana, Illinois, USA, discovered the possibility to create a two-dimensional picture by introducing gradients in the magnetic field. By analysis of the characteristics of the emitted radio waves, he could determine their origin. This made it possible to build up two-dimensional pictures of structures that could not be visualized with other methods.

Peter Mansfield (born 1933), Nottingham, England, further developed the utilization of gradients in the magnetic field. He showed how the signals could be mathematically analysed, which made it possible to develop a useful imaging technique. Mansfield also showed how extremely fast imaging could be achievable. This became technically possible within medicine a decade later.

Source: http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/2003/index.html

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[TTSD]

Why are MRIs only NOW being honored when viagra was so quickly honored when it came out. Oh right, it made their wives VERY happy I guess :-D

 

[....]

Hear hear for imaging!!!

Much applause

 

[doepug]

It's about time radiologists got some recognition! Seriously, rads is an awesome field, and I hope that the future med students out there will take a look at it.

Oh - BTW, the Nobel 2 years ago was for recognizing NO as a neurotransmitter, which is a far cry from a Nobel prize for Viagra. Although Viagra involves NO metabolism, it was not in any way related to the Nobel.

Cheers,

doepug (MS IV, aspiring radiologist)

 

[Dr. Xavier]

Originally posted by doepug


Oh - BTW, the Nobel 2 years ago was for recognizing NO as a neurotransmitter, which is a far cry from a Nobel prize for Viagra. Although Viagra involves NO metabolism, it was not in any way related to the Nobel.

Hey wasn't that NO guy at UCLA, go bruins, and vasodilation of the male organ.

 

[JonnieQuest]

Originally posted by Dr. Xavier
Hey wasn't that NO guy at UCLA, go bruins, and vasodilation of the male organ.

Hell yeah! Ignarro, baby...he has a gold plaque on his lab door saying something like "Ignarro laboratory--where NO function was elucidated." It was said more eloquently but it's all i remember...it's in CHS.

GO BRUINS! And Dr. Xavier--i'm glad you share my interest in those hot persian women...a man with good taste. and no, they never give me the time of day either. maybe because i don't wear Diesel jeans and Armani shirts.

 

[Gleevec]

Oh well,
I guess discovery of mouse knock-outs, HIV, transmembrane signaling receptors, and RNAi will have to wait for another year!

 

[potuhusky]

Originally posted by doepug

Oh - BTW, the Nobel 2 years ago was for recognizing NO as a neurotransmitter, which is a far cry from a Nobel prize for Viagra. Although Viagra involves NO metabolism, it was not in any way related to the Nobel.

doepug (MS IV, aspiring radiologist) [/B]

actually, the nobel prize in physiology or medicine given 2 years ago was awarded to my boss, lee hartwell at fred hutchinson cancer research center/university of washington for discovering cell-cycle checkpoints, which is important for cancer drug targets. a couple of other brit dudes got in on the prize as well.

 

[ewing]

The NO Nobel was awarded in 1998...actually 5 years ago, but time flies. I know.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1998
"for their discoveries concerning nitric oxide as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system"

Robert F. Furchgott
Louis J. Ignarro
Ferid Murad

SUNY Health Science Center
Brooklyn, NY, USA
University of California School of Medicine
Los Angeles, CA, USA
University of Texas Medical School at Houston
Houston, TX, USA

b. 1916
b. 1941
b. 1936

 

[TTSD]

Originally posted by potuhusky
actually, the nobel prize in physiology or medicine given 2 years ago was awarded to my boss, lee hartwell at fred hutchinson cancer research center/university of washington for discovering cell-cycle checkpoints, which is important for cancer drug targets. a couple of other brit dudes got in on the prize as well.

Wow! Awesome.. so your boss is the one I need to kick the **** out of for making my life miserable at memorizing those pathways?

 

[potuhusky]

Originally posted by TTSD
Wow! Awesome.. so your boss is the one I need to kick the **** out of for making my life miserable at memorizing those pathways?

i don't think these particular pathways are even in general text books yet. but don't take off your boots just yet. you can go ahead and kick my girlfriend's former boss's ass, professor kreb... yes, as in the "kreb/TCA cycle!" he's still around here at U-DUB and yes he also won a penny man (noble) for his work as well.

 

[NRAI2001]

Would winning a nobel prize improve your chances at getting into med school

 

[W222]

THE KREBS YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT DIDNT FIND THE TCA CYCLE. That Krebs won in '53 (I believe) and he is dead. The Krebs you are talking about won for phospho regulation.

 

[periodic]

There must be something about the name Krebs...Two Noble's related to bio/medicine

 

[TTSD]

Originally posted by potuhusky
i don't think these particular pathways are even in general text books yet. but don't take off your boots just yet. you can go ahead and kick my girlfriend's former boss's ass, professor kreb... yes, as in the "kreb/TCA cycle!" he's still around here at U-DUB and yes he also won a penny man (noble) for his work as well.

No, I had to become very familiar with the CDCs and CDKs several times in my life.. each more traumatizing than the first. I shall kick his @$$. Then I will kick your girlfriend's boss' @$$

 

[soonerpillow]

This is great interview fodder. I was asked about it the morning it was announced. Needless to say, I had no idea. So read up on it!

 

[Aptamer]

The Nobel in Chemistry was given yesterday to the studies of channels in cell membranes, aquaporins and ion channels, by Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon .

 

[potuhusky]

Originally posted by W222
THE KREBS YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT DIDNT FIND THE TCA CYCLE. That Krebs won in '53 (I believe) and he is dead. The Krebs you are talking about won for phospho regulation.

i stand corrected. i should kick my bio proff's a$$ for giving me this false impression. aparently he's not the only one up there to make this f**K up.

"Edwin G. Krebs is a soft-spoken, understated Midwesterner, but there's one thing that gets his goat. Since he turned his attention from medicine to biochemistry, people have been asking him about "his" cycle. They confuse him with Sir H.A. Krebs, the British scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 1953 for elucidating the metabolic Krebs (or tricarboxylic acid) cycle.

One person who made this mistake was the chairman of a clinical department at the UW School of Medicine in 1948, when Krebs started as an assistant professor of biochemistry.

"I must confess that I didn't correct his wrong impression," says Krebs. "I was so uneasy about my status then that I enjoyed being treated with such deference, even for the wrong reason."

In 1992, Krebs and Edmond H. Fischer were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for figuring out how reversible phosphorylation works as a switch to activate proteins and regulate various cellular processes. "

 

[digambara]

Talk about being on the cusp of groundbreaking research. It seems like almost half of Mackinnon's publications over his career have been in either Cell, Science, or Nature. Within the span of only one year (May 2002-May 2003), one of his postdocs was an author in five Nature articles (four of them first author).

That is incredible.

 

[What the pho]

I forgot which one but one of the watson and crick is at UCSD, ya know the dna double helix guys. I think they just had like the 50 year thing.

 

[Aptamer]

Dr. Crick is at Salk in San Diego, not at UCSD. Dr. Watson runs Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

 

[What the pho]

They lied to me they told me crick is at UCSD. okay how about that PCR guy, I've heard he is here.

 

[vikas]

I heard the PCR guy retired from sceince and is a surfer.

At Berkeley, they always tell the story of Kary Mullis. Basically he was some stoner who figured out the PCR thing on the way up to Mendocino watching the cars go by in either direction. High as hell, he saw the cars going by and started thinking of polymerase, go figure. Anyway, I heard that for the discorvery, the company he was working for gave him a 10k bonus. A few years later, they turned around and sold PCR for close to a billion dollars. Kary apparently just reitred from science and became a surfer after all that.

 

[Aptamer]

Uh...Kary Mullis is still around. He's the senior scientific adviser for Burstein Technologies (K. Mullis).

Although he is a nut...supposedly when he lectures, he would show nude pics (supposedly of his girlfriend) every five or six slides. Has anyone been to his lectures and confirm this?

 

[doctor Moo]

Back to the MRI thread, did anyone else see the full page ad in the New York Times put out by MDs furious about the omission of Damadian (MD) from the MRI Nobel Prize (to PhDs)? Some think he didn't get the nobel prizes for his religious views. In any case, Damadian is odd & interesting:

Raymond V. Damadian, inventor of the method known today as magnetic resonance imaging or MRI, was born in Forest Hills, New York in 1936. He studied violin at the Julliard School of Music in New York for eight years before winning a scholarship, at age 16, to the University of Wisconsin. There he received a BS in mathematics in 1956 and then turned to medicine, earning an MD in 1960 from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Bronx, NY). After his internship, residency, and Fellowships at Washington University and Harvard, Dr. Damadian served for some time in the Air Force, then joined the faculty of SUNY Downstate Medical Center. There, his research into sodium and potassium in living cells led him to his first experiments with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) which caused him to first propose the MR body scanner in 1969.

For more, see
http://www.christianitytoday.com/cr/7r1/7r1062.html
http://www.armenians.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=5040

 

[MacGyver]

MRI is a very complex history. There are 10 or 15 key people involved, so its very hard to just recognize a single person or two.

Its not liek the telephone where there was a clearcut inventor. MRI came about in steps, it wasnt a "eureka" moment like other things.

I compare the development of MRI to the development of the computer. There were a lot of people involved in a very convoluted development history.

 

[Gleevec]

Woah, sounds like sour grapes to me

Originally posted by doctor Moo
Back to the MRI thread, did anyone else see the full page ad in the New York Times put out by MDs furious about the omission of Damadian (MD) from the MRI Nobel Prize (to PhDs)? Some think he didn't get the nobel prizes for his religious views. In any case, Damadian is odd & interesting:



For more, see
http://www.christianitytoday.com/cr/7r1/7r1062.html
http://www.armenians.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=5040

 

[Castro Viejo]

Yeah, it sure is sour grapes.

But how would you feel if you were so close to achieving immortality and then someone somewhere tells you that what you did was nice, but not significant?

I'm entirely impartial (though a Downstate grad) to the issue of whether or not Damadian deserves to be included as one of three Nobel winners for the discovery of MR scanning, but clearly the guy's ego has been hurt to the point of no return. A $100,000 ad in the New York Times and an $80,000 ad in the Washington Post to protest the Nobel Committee's decision? That's one serious gripe.

In the end this will be an interesting footnote in the history of the Nobel Prize. If Damadian didn't achieve notoriety for his contribution through sharing the Nobel with Lauterbur and Mansfield, he will have certainly become infamous for being the first man to publicly poo-poo on the Committee's decision.

As an aside, it would've been nice to have another Nobel Laureate for SUNY Downstate (the first being in 1998 for Robert Furchgott's discovery of NO as the elusive EDRF).

 

[Gradient Echo]

I think its extremely dubious for one person to claim they "invented" MRI.

The fact that Damadian keeps sticking to that claim strikes me as incredibly presumptuous and arrogant.

What Lauterbur and Mansfield did was develop the key ingredients (gradient coil design and fourier transform imaging) that allowed MRI to become such a clinically useful modality.

Although Damadian did build the first MR scanner, his scanner does NOT use gradient technology or the correct signal transforming mathematics.

Damadian's scanner was a novelty, and he certainly played a big role in the development of MRI.

However, Damadian's scanner would not have become a clinically useful modality without the influence of Lauterbur and Mansfield. In fact, without their influence on gradient coil imaging and fourier transform projection, Damadian's MR scanner would hold very little clinical value.

Lauterbur and Mansfields' contributions to MRI resulted in a paradigm shift that made MRI the best overall imaging modality in existence.