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Russian Researcher Vladislav Ivanov Could Have Received The 2003 Nobel Prize In Medicine

October 31, 2003

The 2003 Nobel Prize laureates in Medicine and Physiology - Peter Mansfield and Paul Lautenbur - have won their prizes for inventing the magnetic resonance imaging method for precise diagnostics of various diseases. However, few people know that Vladislav Ivanov, lieutenant of the Soviet Army, contrived this method 13 years earlier. The interview of the Russian inventor with Tatiana Bateneva, reporter of the IZVESTIA newspaper, was published in the Saturday issue on October 25, 2003.

Professor Vladislav Ivanov, Doctor of Technical Sciences, now heads the chair of measuring technologies and computer-aided tomography, St. Petersburg State Institute of High-Precision Mechanics and Optics. Forty-five years ago he served at a rocket airfield in the town of Suchan (Maritime Territory) and was engaged in the natural objects navigation based on the magnetic field of the Earth. When applying a device which measured nuclear magnetic resonance in the water, a young lieutenant wondered if it was possible to apply this method to investigating a human organism, as it also generally consist of water.

The author presented his ideas in the form of four applications for an invention. Unfortunately, the inventor failed to receive a patent for one of the inventions ('Free-precession proton microscope') due to the enormous tax he had to pay. Another application ('Investigation technique for internal structure of bodies') articulated the principles of the technique and provided the scheme of the device that is now called the MR-imager. Two other Ivanov's applications could be applied to imaging the local pulse, digestion, solution of drugs, etc. Unfortunately, at that time all his applications were rejected as they were considered unfeasible. In 1973 Paul Lautenbur fixed and segregated the MR-signal from two species of water in test-tubes, and three years later Raymond Damadian, who is now contesting the priority of invention against the current Nobel Prize winners, received images of a live mouse. However, all of them were no pioneers

Vladislav Ivanov's name appears in the 'Who is Who' reference book, where he has been called the inventor of magnetic resonance images. Vladislav Ivanov was further engaged in the invention, he has more than 150 inventor's certificates, although the largest reward won by him made Rub 500.

Sergei Leskov, reporter of the IZVESTIA newspaper, provides for statistics which is dismal for Russia: since 1917 only 12 Russian scientists have won the Nobel Prize, this fact being inadequate to the real contribution by Russian researchers to the world science. The reason lies in the multiple-year secrecy of the Soviet science, ideological impediments, besides, there ocurred several cases of obvious injustice on behalf of the Nobel Committee. Thus, the 1930 Prize for discovery of the combinational scattering phenomenon was given to Raman, although the article by Grigori Landsberg and Leonid Mandelshtam had been published earlier. In 1951, the Prize was given to McMillan (USA) for discovery of the self-phasing principle. Vladimir Veksler did not get the Prize as the Nobel Committee was unaware whether reactors based on this principle were available in Russia - the reactors were operating but they were classified as secret ones. Evgeny Zavoyski observed electron spin resonance in 1944, but the Prize was received by Bloch and Purcell (USA) in 1952 for the discovery made three years later than Zavoyski had. In 1938, Pyotr Kapitsa did not get the Prize for the discovery of superfluidity, although his article was published in the same issue as a similar work by the Americans. The decision to award Lev Landau was repeatedly postponed. In the recent years, Vladlen Letokhov did not get the Prize, although his investigations of cooling atoms by a directed beam had been carried out ahead of investigations by Chu and Phillips (USA), but the inventor was nominated by none of the colleagues. And in 1997, the Prize for investigation of nitric oxide as a signal molecule for the cardiovascular system was received by Furchgott, Ignarro and Murad (USA), although similar investigations had been accomplished earlier by Anatoly Vanin.

Informnauka (Informscience) Agency