Gifted Mind: The Dr Raymond Damadian Story: Inventor of MRI

When I heard about Gifted Mind: The Dr Raymond Damadian Story-Inventor of the MRI by Jeff Kinley with Dr Raymond Damadian, published by Master books, I was interested to find out about the man who invented MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). I hadn't previously heard of Raymond Damadian nor knew anything about the story of how MRI was invented and wanted to find out more. My hope was that I would either be able to read the book or parts of it aloud to my children or be able to tell them about Damadian having read the book.

Raymond Damadian was born in the US to parents of Armenian descent. The story of his father's escape from Turkey is hair raising. The death of his Grandmother from cancer left young Damadian keen to help find a cure for cancer. Obviously, a very bright student, Damadian qualified as a doctor before entering research. During his study of sodium and potassium transport in the cell, he realised the potential of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging to scan whole human beings. The story of how the first whole body MRI machine was made is worth reading as well as the details of the first attempts at scanning a human.

Whilst the outline of the story is fascinating, I found this a difficult and somewhat irritating book to read. The first chapter  is called The Truth and spends some time discussing Creation vs Evolution. I firmly believe in the Biblical account of Creation but this chapter is written in such a way that I do not think that it would do anything other than anger someone who believes the Theory of Evolution. For example, phrases such as

  Evolution is merely the scientific community’s “sideshow,” with a

few mythical freaks and some smoke and mirrors thrown in to divert the audience’s attention .

appears to me to be unhelpful.

A whole chapter is devoted to patents and patent battles. Some of this was highly technical and could have been condensed. Similarly, whilst it may well have been an injustice that Dr Damadian wasn't awarded the Noble Prize for Medicine, I am not sure that it is profitable to devote a chapter to this.

It would have been helpful to have had more information about Dr Damadian's return to faith and particular, around how his thinking changed. 

The penultimate chapter has some fascinating figures about the probability of evolution and the last chapter has some interesting MRI images particularly those involving the Upright MRI scanner.

In many ways, this book would be improved by heavy editing to take out the unhelpful and circuitous comments and leave a concise biography of someone who has made a major contribution to science and some introductory information about the importance of MRI in medicine today.

Disclaimer: I was provided with an e-copy of The Gifted Mind for the purposes of this review. I was not required to write a positive review and the opinions stated are my own.

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