Nobel prize winners announced

The Nobel prize winners were announced recently, and not for the first time there has been some controversary involved [link]. Both the prize for Medicine and for Physics were awarded for contributions to the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Paul Laterbur, and Peter Mansfield, were awarded the prize for Medicine, while the prize for Physics went to Vitaly Ginsburg, Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett. But a US researcher claims "the Nobel committee is rewriting history" [link].

Raymond Damadian is the founder and director of Fonar Corp., which produces MRI scanners. He owns a patent based on his discovery in 1970 that normal and cancerous tissue could be distinguished using nuclear magnetic resonance. In response to the announcement the prize for Medicine would be awarded to Lauterbur and Mansfield, but not himself, he has had published full page advertisements in the Washington Post and New York Times calling the decision "The Shame That Must Be Righted." The secretary of the Nobel Assembly at Karolinka Intitutet, Hans Jornvall, has pointed out that the decision could not be appealed.

The prizes for Chemistry, to Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon for work on cell membrane channels, Literature, to novelist J.M. Coetzee, and Economics, to Robert Engle and Clive Granger, attracted much less attention.

The Peace prize, to Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, has received a luke warm response from the Tehrans right wing press, concerned at the implications of the prize [link] but this has been dismissed by the government [link].