September 13, 2016 Show with Dr. Ray Damadian, Inventor of the MRI on his book “Gifted Mind”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, "'Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.'"

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, "'We are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.'"

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour. And we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host, Chris Arnton. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming.

This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 13th day of September 2016.

And I'm delighted and honored to have a world -renowned inventor on this program today, a man who is responsible for the saving of countless lives due to the early detection of cancer and other very serious and terminal illnesses.

His name is Dr. Ray Damadian, and he is the inventor of the

MRI. We're gonna be discussing a book that is about him, a biography about him called

Gifted Mind, which he cooperated with. It was written by Jeff Kinley, and Dr.

Damadian helped Jeff in the writing of this biography. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Dr.

Damadian, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. We apologize to those who are listening live that we did not start promptly at 4 p .m.

We had a power outage here, and our computer system went down unexpectedly just seconds before we were supposed to begin our interview, but God thankfully restored everything, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr.

Raymond Damadian. Hello, hello everybody, hello

Chris. Yeah, it's great to have you on the program, Dr. Damadian, and I think you and I have some mutual friends, if I'm not mistaken.

I think that you used to be a friend of my very dear friend Marty Fromm, who went home to be with the

Lord not long ago. Beth Yeshua Ministries on Long Island.

I can remember being at a Passover celebration that his

Messianic congregation had, and he was waiting for your arrival, and it was so crowded that day that I never had a chance to meet you face -to -face, but I'm glad that we are finally speaking on this program.

Before we even get into the MRI itself, which stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and your work in that area,

I'd like to know something about your own personal background growing up as a child, what kind of religious atmosphere, if any, you were raised in, and when you got the idea in your head that you wanted to get involved in the scientific realm?

Well, I grew up on Long Island, Chris. Just like I did? In the place where the international championships were played for many years in Forest Hills in Queens, and I went to public school in Queens, and I was very active in the

First Congregational Church of Forest Hills all through my youth and growth.

And then I went away, I went to Forest Hills High School, and as I said,

I was active in the Pilgrim Fellowship of the Congregational Church of Forest Hills, then

I went away to the University of Wisconsin, ultimately coming back to New York when

I was hired as a professor at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center.

And so you were involved in the medical field, and when did this idea come to mind that another invention was necessary, other than an

X -ray, other than a CAT scan, or whatever was available prior to the

MRI? How did this vision come to your mind for the creation of this invention, this remarkable thing?

I think the way it came out, Chris, was that as a practicing physician,

I was just very much aware, as all practicing physicians were at the time, that if you went and looked at ordinary radiology images of the vital organs of the body, the heart, the brain, the kidney, the liver, the spleen, the imaging detail that you were getting was very poor, was really limited.

And the long and short of it is, when you make a medical image, you make it up of what we call picture elements.

They're referred to as pixels. So if I take an image and I enlarge it with a magnifier, you'll see those pixels, the picture elements, and a typical image will have 65 ,000 of those picture elements called pixels.

Now, the critical thing to seeing detail in the image is you have to be able to create contrast between one pixel and the pixel next to it, because if all the pixels have the same brightness, your image is a blank.

And at that time, the X -ray technology was really deficient in its ability to see detail.

To be specific, the maximum contrast you could get between a two -or -pixel and a normal pixel was 4%.

And that was really the problem, that when you pass an X -ray through somebody's body, you really couldn't see detail in the critical organs of the body.

And just everybody was sensitive to that. And I think

I should even backtrack a little bit farther, because I glossed over something that's very important in your own life story that brought you into the medical field to begin with.

When you were a young boy, you watched your grandmother die painfully from breast cancer, did you not?

Yes, that's correct. And I was devastated by it. And I just fixated in my head that if I ever had a chance,

I wanted to do something about that disease. So that's basically what was the catalyst behind you even wanting to become a doctor when you grew up, as they say.

That's right. And when you came about with this idea for the

MRI, the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Machine, what was available other than a standard

X -ray machine? Was a CAT scan available, or what were the other things that were available? The CAT scanner may have been around for a year or so.

Well, when I came up with the, I had the original idea of 1969.

Wow. And I don't remember the exact year the CAT scanner came out.

So, when I came up with it in 1969,

I don't think the CAT scanner was out yet. Now, obviously there is more than just medical knowledge that would be required to come up with an invention like this.

You need all kinds of knowledge, don't you, to come up with an actual invention as complicated as the

MRI? Well, I really think an important part of this was that I was fortunate that I had a scientific investigation that was very detailed that I was pursuing, but at the same time,

I was an MD. And what's implicit in what you're asking,

Chris, was the fact that I had the medical education and the technical education enabled me to see the big picture.

The big picture being scanning the human body when the NMR technology at the time was just looking at 10 millimeter test tubes for chemical analysis.

So, basically to get to the MRI, somebody was gonna have to come along and look at that test tube analyzer that had been there for 23 years and say, holy smokes, you could do something on the human body.

Well, a chemist really was not in a good position to do that because he was doing chemistry.

It was a physician who was very sensitive to the reality that he might make a diagnosis on a patient and suddenly discover at autopsy that the patient had a cancer that nobody ever knew was there.

And it's those experiences that created the urgent need, at least in your soul, that if you ever had a chance, you'd like to overcome that.

Now, obviously, you didn't just build a prototype in your garage with old washing machine parts and all that.

I mean, how did you actually get to see? I think, Chris, there's another piece to it, too.

At one point, I had some, like all of us have from time to time, some gastroesophageal distress, some hypersensitivity in the stomach, but I didn't know what it was at the time.

And I went to some physicians, and the physicians said, well, it could be duodenal, but it could also be malignant, and we don't know where to begin.

So, looking at that, we don't think it's so likely, but that is a consideration, and I was naturally concerned about the fact that didn't have an immediate way to tell me how to do that.

And so, did you eventually, when you started to come up with these concepts way back in 1969, did you sit down with some other person, like a machinist, or somebody that was capable of helping you bring this idea into a blueprint of some kind?

I mean, how did this develop into an actual physical prototype? Well, when

I joined the university, I had been previously, for two years, doing a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard in biophysics, because as a high school student and a college student,

I had majored in math. And so,

I was very interested at that, and one of the things that got my attention when

I was doing my research at Harvard was that this curiosity of this extraordinary phenomenon that every living individual is a walking

Con Ed plant generating his own electricity. And that's what we all kind of take for granted, but you don't realize that you're a walking

Con Ed plant. Wow. And you're generating your own electricity. And when life ceases, the

Con Ed plant shuts off. Just like my computer system did before you came on the air.

Yeah, that's right. So, I was naturally curious, because I was doing biophysics, how does the human body turn into a

Con Ed plant? I mean, what's the basics of that? And as I looked into that and I was curious about it, what

I became aware of, that there were two physicists in the

UK, Hodgkin and Huxley, who had studied that, and they looked at cells, and they were interested in how the living cell generates this voltage.

Because the fact that your body generates electricity is really the result of the fact that all of the individual cells of your body are generating a voltage, generating their own electricity.

So Hodgkin and Huxley inquired about that, and they were very curious about it, said, how does that come about?

And they came up with the answer. What they were able to show for the first time, that if you looked very carefully at the anatomy and the chemistry of the living cell, there were certain atoms on the inside of the cell that differed in concentration from the atoms immediately outside the cell.

And I'll be specific, the potassium atom was 140 millimoles per liter inside the cell, and outside the cell, it was only four millimoles per liter.

Now that was very interesting, because the potassium atom is not a neutral atom.

It carries with it a charge, a one -plus charge. So medically and chemically, we refer to it as an ion.

So there was 140 millimoles per liter of this one -plus potassium charge inside the cell, and there were only four millimoles per liter of this one -plus charge outside the cell.

So Hodgkin and Huxley recognized, hey, that difference in the concentration of these charged atoms could generate a voltage.

And they took those concentrations of 140 and four on the outside, and they put it into the well -known electrochemical equation for batteries called the

Nernst equation, and lo and behold, the voltage they calculated from those numbers was the same voltage that you got when you stuck an electrode directly into the cell.

Wow. So now, all of a sudden, they knew where this voltage was arising from.

It was arising from the asymmetry of the high concentration of these one -plus charge potassium ions inside the cell versus the low concentration on the outside, and that was what was causing the voltage.

Now, however, it produced a consternation, because if you looked a little bit more carefully, which they did, you found that if you looked at another atom that carried a one -plus charge, namely the sodium atom, in terms of its distribution, you had the exact reverse.

You had 140 one -plus sodiums outside the cell, and you had four one -plus sodiums inside the cell.

So the obvious next question was, well, wait a minute, Doctors Hodgkin and Huxley, how does the cell choose potassium and exclude sodium?

Because it must do that in order to generate that voltage. And Hodgkin and Huxley said, well, the cell has attached to its surface a protein molecule, and that protein pumps potassium into the cell and pumps sodium out of the cell, and that's how it's coming about.

Yes, and there are people who reject the existence of God, who reject intelligent design of the universe, who think that something like that just evolved by happenstance.

Yeah, it just accidentally occurred, right. But then, at that time,

I was a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University of St.

Louis, and I was in the nephrology department working on the physiology of the kidney.

And I asked my professor at the time, when he was giving this little talk to our group about how the cell had this pump that was pumping potassium into the cell, and sodium out of the cell,

I said, wait a minute, Dr. Bricker, I said, okay, now I'm curious about this pump. Has anybody isolated and purified that protein molecule that's on the surface of the cell that you are referring to as a sodium pump?

And his answer was, the guy who does that is gonna win the Nobel Prize. So that caught my interest.

And so then, right after that, I became a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University.

And when I arrived there, and I was being interviewed for my, my professor then was

Professor Arthur K. or A .K. Solomon, and he was a

PhD, and he was head of the biophysics department at Harvard.

And when I was interviewing with him, he said, well, what is it the research you wanna do when you come here today?

I said, well, you know, Dr. Solomon, this pump has this phenomenal responsibility to general electricity, to generate electricity for the whole body.

I said, has anybody, as far as I know, nobody's isolated and purified it.

I'd like to do that, Dr. Solomon. He said, oh, you came to the right lab, Domanian. I said, what do you mean,

Dr. Solomon? He said, well, we're interested in that, Dr. Domanian, and I actually started an initiative on that.

Well, what do you mean, Dr. Solomon? He said, well, the way we thought to go about it was to grow up experimental bacteria.

We'd grow up a big flask of E. coli bacteria, and they'll have the high, they'll do the same thing, they generate the same voltage, they'll have a high potassium inside and low potassium on the outside, and now what you can do,

Domanian, is you can make a mutant of that E. coli. You make a mutant that can't do it.

Then we'll have a bacterial cell that can do it, and we'll have a mutant of the very same bacteria that can't do it, and now we can start fractionating the proteins of the two, and we should find a protein that doesn't match up, and that's your pump,

Domanian. So what you should do,

Domanian, then, is if you're interested in this, proceed on the objective to make a mutant of this bacteria,

E. coli. We've already tried to do it. They had made a mutant, then it turned out to be a contaminant, and I said, well, wait a minute,

Dr. Solomon. I said, this is such a vital structure to generating life itself and generate electricity that how do

I know if I ever try to make a mutant that the mutant can't live without it, and then

I'll never be able to find the mutant? And his answer was, that's your problem.

So I didn't know if I could do it or not, but anyway, I started off doing it, and to my amazement, in about two or three months,

I found a mutant that could not accumulate potassium and markedly different from the parent strain.

So now I was ready for my charge, which was to try to find this protein that was the sodium pump, and at that point in time,

I was assigned to the

United States Air Force, and I was inducted into the Air Force, and I went to the School of Aerospace Medicine in San Antonio, Texas in the

Air Force, and when I got there, my professor was Colonel Lou Bitter, and he was in charge of the division that I was in, and when

I got there, he said, well, what kind of work have you done before?

What work were you doing at Harvard? And I said, well, Colonel Bitter, what

I did at Harvard was I isolated a mutant that was unable to accumulate potassium, and my ultimate goal was to track down this protein that should be the sodium pump, and he said, oh, that's a very interesting debate, and why don't you continue that work while you're here at the

School of Aerospace Medicine, and I'll only ask you one thing, to, from time to time in your experience, add the rocket fuel hydrazine, which we are contracted to research, add it to your test tubes, and we can also then see what the hydrazine effect is, and then what

I would encourage you, Dr. Debadian, to do is continue your research to isolate that sodium pump.

So that was great, so I went ahead and did that, and I spent the next two years fractionating proteins, trying to find this protein that would be the sodium pump, and I failed.

Then I just could not find a protein that was distinctly different, that would qualify as the pump, the pump protein.

After that, I finished at the Air Force. I was hired as a professor at the

State University of New York at the medical school, the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, and so I became a young professor there, and I brought with me my mutant

E. coli bacteria, and the parent strain E. coli bacteria, and I continued my fractionation efforts in fractionating proteins to try to find the pump, the protein that was different, and I continued that for about six months, and I still wasn't getting anywhere, and I wasn't finding it, so one day

I suddenly said to myself, wait a minute, Debadian, you know what you should do before you look at this?

You should look in detail at the evidence that exists for the existence of this pump, and look at all the scientific literature and examine it very critically to see the evidence that there is, that such a pump exists, because if it doesn't exist,

Debadian, you'll be looking for it for the rest of your life. So then I went to the library intent to spend six months looking at every piece of scientific literature

I could find to find out the solidness and the strength of the evidence that this pump genuinely existed, and as I began my research,

I was astounded that the first thing I ran into was a book by a professor at the

University of Pennsylvania named Gilbert Ning Ling, PhD, and the whole substance of his 500 -page book was that the pump was fiction.

The sodium pump did not exist. Wow. I was astounded, and the evidence was very, very compelling.

So there was a lot of detailed chemistry, et cetera, so I said, well, wait a minute, so now, and I was pretty well convinced by his evidence that there was, the pump didn't exist.

So then as I began to contemplate on it some more, if the pump wasn't there to selectively accumulate potassium and exclude sodium, the main thing, how did it, how did the cell do that?

Because that was a definite reality that the cell was able to selectively accumulate potassium and exclude sodium.

I said, all right, all right, I gotta sit down and research this. And one of the things that immediately occurred to me was that, well, this potassium atom carries a one -plus charge and the living cell is loaded with large molecules like protein, proteins and nucleic acids that carry negative charges, and that these large molecules are anchored to the basic structure of the cell and they can't move around.

So in the simplest way of looking at it, the potassium is accumulating on the inside of the cell just simply as the counter ion for the negative charges because you can't have these, these charges can't be separated, the voltages are very large.

So for electrical neutrality to be accomplished, then that's one of the things that the potassium, the function that this liquid potassium could be providing is a counter ion for the large number of negative ions on the inside of the living cell that were anchored into the fabric of the protein and the nucleic acid cell.

The proteins were loaded with a molecular piece that's called a carboxyl that has a negative charge,

C double O minus, and the nucleic acids were loaded with a negative charge as part of the phosphate, that's part of the

DNA and the RNA. So they all carry negative charge, they're anchored to the cell. So the obvious thing from my perspective is all right, that's how the potassium is doing, it's sticking to the negative charges of those molecules.

But I now had another question to answer, which wasn't easy. All right, you made it, but why potassium sticking inside the cell and not sodium?

In fact, let's get that question answered after our commercial break, we have to go to our first commercial break.

Okay. Why potassium and not sodium? And we will be back after these messages. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Dr.

Damadian, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

We already have a couple of people waiting to have their questions asked. And answered. And we would love to hear from you if an

MRI detected a life -threatening illness early enough that it saved your life.

We would love to hear from you if you have a testimony like that as well. But we're gonna be back after these messages.

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That's wrbc .us. Welcome back. This is Chris Arns.

And if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours is Dr. Raymond Damadian, inventor of the

MRI, an invention that has no doubt been used of God to save the lives of countless millions of people.

And we are delighted to have him on our program today. If you'd like to join us with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. And you can ask any kind of question at all in regard to Dr.

Damadian's medical background, his invention, or if you have a testimony about how an MRI exam saved your life or the life of a loved one.

That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com. But if you could pick up right where you left off before the break, Dr. Damadian.

Hello, Dr. Damadian? Well, it seems that Dr. Damadian is not with us.

We're gonna go to another station break and hopefully when we come back, he will be online with us.

So don't go away, we will be right back with Dr. Raymond Damadian, God willing.

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Call Linbrook Baptist at 516 -599 -9402. That's 516 -599 -9402 or visit linbrookbaptist .org.

That's linbrookbaptist .org. Welcome back, Dr. Damadian, are you there? I'm here.

Okay, great, well, let's see. Go ahead, go ahead, Chris. We got disconnected somehow and I'm not sure how.

But anyway, before the break, you had a complicated issue that you couldn't understand and it involved potassium,

I believe, if you could just continue where you left off there. Yeah, okay, Chris, well, I was talking about how living cells generate their own electricity and so how every human being is a walking

Con Ed plant. Right. And I had reached the point that I couldn't depend on this molecule that had been speculated, the sodium pump, and I had to find another explanation for how the cell generated 90 millivolts of voltage in the living cell and I had gradually come to the conclusion that the way it was doing was it was piling up this plus charge potassium to the tune of 140 and had only four plus charge on the outside of the cell.

So you had a big gradation grade between them and that's where the voltage came from. But the question I had to answer was the body is also full of sodium.

So how come potassium was inside the cell and not sodium? Hodgkin and Huxley had argued in their original theory that there was a protein molecule on the inside of the cell that was pumping potassium in and pumping sodium out and I started my scientific research to try to isolate that pump.

And I made a mutant, so I said I was working on it for three years. I had a mutant of the bacteria that couldn't do it.

I had a parent strain that could. When I fractionated the proteins, I should be able to find the protein that was dissimilar between the two and that should be my pump.

And I worked on it for three years looking for that pump. I couldn't find a pump and I went to the library to find out where was the evidence to support that pump.

And the first thing I ran into was a book by Gilbert Nyingling, A Physical Theory of the

Living State that was 500 pages that argued that there was no pump. And the evidence that he was providing was very convincing.

It was a massive amount of evidence. I then started looking myself for an alternative explanation and I jumped to the conclusion that well, the way the potassium could be building up, it could be sticking to the negative ions of the cell that were part of the structural fabric of the cell itself.

But now I had to answer the same question. Why potassium and not sodium? And I said, right,

I really didn't know the answer to that but in my reading I ran across another entity that was doing it without the benefit of a pump, namely ion exchange resins.

Now to be specific, one of the things that chemists do on a regular basis is they do something called chromatography and the reason they do it is that they'll have a solution in a test tube that'll have maybe a bunch of different molecules in it and now they wanna separate one molecule from the other molecule.

And they do that by this process called chromatography. And more specifically what that is is you take a glass cylinder that's about four feet tall and you pour these beads into this glass cylinder with the beads in it and you take your solution of 10 molecules and you pour it on the top of this glass column and it percolates through this column through these beads and now it comes out one drop at a time on the other end and you move your test tubes one to the next, collecting these drops sequentially and now what you've done is you have successfully separated one molecule from the other so you now know what your individual molecules are.

Well the critical element though are these beads on the inside of the column and those beads are called resin beads,

R -E -S -I -N, ion exchange resin beads. So now as I, so then

I went ahead and I started studying up on the chemistry of ion exchange resin beads and lo and behold

I discovered that they too were able to accumulate potassium and exclude sodium with no benefit from a sodium pump.

They were able to do it on their own, not to the same magnitude as a living cell but they were able to do it.

So I said wait a minute, how do the chemists account for the fact that these beads are able to selectively accumulate the potassium ion and exclude the sodium ion?

Because that could in principle be the answer to my question, how the living cell does that. And the answer was these two atoms, these two ions, the sodium ion and the potassium ion do not run around in life naked.

But each one of these ions in its circulation has an atmosphere around it of water.

So every ion in our natural environment is coated with a surrounding atmosphere of water molecules.

And their answer as to how these ion exchange beads were able to selectively accumulate potassium was that if you looked at the bead in more detail it was tight space inside the bead.

There was not a lot of room. And the result, the consequence was that it was gonna be very choosy and make an effort automatically to choose the smaller hydrated ion.

But when you looked into that carefully you came to the result that the hydrated sodium ion is substantially bigger than the fully hydrated potassium ion.

And there's a reason. If you look at the periodic table, the atomic table, sodium is a smaller atom than potassium.

But when they're in their ion state they both have the same one plus charge.

So if you take that charge and divide it by the surface area, the amount of surface you have, the amount of surface on the sodium ion is much smaller than the amount of surface of the potassium ion.

So if you compute the charge per unit surface area, the charge per unit surface area of sodium is gonna be much higher because it's got a much smaller surface than the potassium ion which has got a much bigger surface.

The long and short of that is that the charge per unit of surface on the sodium ion is gonna be much more than the charge per unit surface area on the potassium ion.

The net result then is that the sodium ion is going to accumulate more water molecules because of that higher charge density than the potassium ion is gonna accumulate.

And then the fully hydrated sodium is gonna be larger than the fully hydrated potassium ion.

And there's another detail here that's important and that is that the water molecule, while it doesn't carry a net charge, is actually what we would refer to as a polar molecule.

And if you visualize this water molecule, you visualize an oxygen in the center and two hydrogens attached to it, but those two hydrogens are not attached to it on a single straight line.

They are attached with what we call a tetrahedral angle between them so that one end of this water molecule is a naked oxygen and the other end of this water molecule is two hydrogen atoms separated by 40 degrees.

Now, the result of that is that that water molecule then has a polarity.

The oxygen side of the water molecule is negative relative to the hydrogen side of the water molecule.

And as a result, that's why water is such a good solvent because this two -pole water molecule, what we refer to as a dipole, sticks to ions like potassium and sodium.

And now, since the amount of charge per square surface area of the sodium was larger than the amount of charge per surface area of the potassium, more water molecules stick to the sodium ion than water molecules that stick to the potassium ion with the net result that the fully hydrated sodium ion is a lot larger than the fully hydrated potassium ion.

And the ion exchange chemist said, that's why my ion exchange beads accumulate potassium and not sodium because sodium, fully hydrated, takes up more space and the space is very limited.

So when I looked into all that and I said, look at that, they're accumulating potassium selectively without a pump and they're doing it just because of the difference in the charge density between sodium and potassium, the same thing operates in my living cell.

I don't need a pump to do that as long as the environment on the inside of the living cell is restricted in the amount of access.

And so that's a good answer for how the cell is selectively accumulating potassium and therefore that's a good answer as to how the cell is generating its own electricity.

This is all incredible and it's obviously going way over the heads of those who have no scientific or medical background but what it is definitely giving a clear picture of is that there is no way that human life could have been accidentally evolved somehow.

This requires an intelligent designer.

The whole idea of life by evolution is just scientific nonsense and the long and short of it is the evidence, the scientific evidence for evolution, to my great shock when

I looked into it, the scientific evidence for evolution is zero. It does not exist.

Right, and so how did this discovery that you made, by the way, did you ever let the other scientist whose writings were a catalyst behind you doing further research who came up with the idea that the pump was fiction, did you ever let him know about your discoveries?

Well, I then started publishing papers because I couldn't find this pump,

I couldn't isolate it and I started publishing papers and said, wait a minute, I got another idea of how the cell generates its own electricity.

It selectively accumulates potassium and the way it's doing that is just the way the ion exchange resin beat chemists say it's doing it.

The cell is located with these fixed negative charges, the potassium's sticking to it, the positively charged has to stick to the negative charges and it's potassium and not sodium because the hydrated potassium ion is smaller than the hydrated sodium ion and therefore the way the potassium is being accumulated is that it's not being pumped, it's just sticking there.

Now, then I published this and as a result of this, I got a phone call from a scientist at the

Naval Air Development Center named Freeman Thorndike Cope, was an

MD similar to myself who was a molecular chemist who was doing research at the

Naval Air Development Center and he said, Damadian, so I've been reading your papers. Yeah, yeah, what are you thinking,

Cope? He says, well, listen, how'd you like to prove your idea, Damadian? I said, what are you talking about,

Cope? He said, well, look, I have an idea how you could prove it. What are you talking about,

Cope? He said, well, we could use this new technology called NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance and what we do then,

Damadian, and I've been using it recently in my labs in the Naval Air Development Center, you take what you're able to do with this new technology called nuclear magnetic resonance, you're able to put your sample in the test tube and whatever atom you wanna look at, you just collect a radio signal from that atom and that radio signal you get from that atom is highly specific about the chemistry of what that atom is up to.

So if you're right, Damadian, we should be able to take your cells and put them in a test tube and look for the radio signal in this

NMR technology. One thing that is probably worth pointing out, Chris, is that NMR equals

MRI. So the both words, NMR and MRI, are gonna end up being discussed interchangeably.

Now, NMR is this phenomenon where you get a radio signal from the atom and it sends a nuclear magnetic resonance because the signal is a resonating signal.

And what happened is that when we introduced it to the medical community, they wanted to get rid of the

N, the nuclear, because it sounded like it was radioactive, which it was not.

And then the radiologists, when we introduced it to the medical community, wanted to add the I to identify it as an imaging technology.

So NMR became MRI. So the two words are equivalent.

All right, so Cope is saying to me, Damadian, he said, we may be able to prove your idea that potassium is accumulating inside the cell by sticking to the opposite charges of the negative atoms, he said, because we can do

NMR to test it. I said, what are you talking about, Cope? He said, look, Damadian, if the potassium is really like you think, sticking, accumulating by sticking to the counter negative charges on the inside of the cell, when

I obtain its radio signal, its nuclear resonance signal from the potassium ion, that signal should be different than if that potassium was in a liquid solution.

That signal should be different, if you're right, Damadian, because that potassium ion, potassium atom, is sticking to the negative charge, and that should give a different signal than if it's in free solution and not attached.

So all we have to do, Damadian, is look at the sample of the cells, get the signal, and see if the decay time of that signal is different from the decay time of potassium chloride, for example, in an aqueous solution.

And then we can see if that's true in living tissue. I said, all right, that's great,

Cope. He said, all right, look, and what I suggest, Damadian, is I've been working with a company that sold our

Naval Department the nuclear magnetic resonance machine I have. We're not gonna be able to do the experiments that I'm talking about, but I've spoken to the president of the company as to whether or not we can come there and use his apparatus, because he's a different kind of apparatus that allows us to look at this decay time that I wanna look at,

Damadian. I said, okay, fine. So about a week later, I'm sorry, Cope, let's go ahead, we'll go do it.

So about a week later, I get a phone call from Cope. He says, hey, Damadian, I got a problem. I said, well, what's the problem,

Freeman? I said, I thought there was no problem. He said, yeah, well, I'm worried about it. He says, I'm not so sure we're gonna be able to do this.

I said, well, what's your problem, Cope? He said, well, look, Damadian, I looked into the magnetic moment of the potassium atom, how much magnetism the potassium atom has, because the amount of magnetism is gonna determine whether or not

I'm gonna be able to get one of these signals, one of these radio signals that we're gonna get, Damadian. And I found out that the magnetic moment of the potassium isn't all that great.

On top of that, I was hoping that, well, the way that would be compensated was that there would be enough of an amount of potassium inside the living cell that would compensate for that and still give me a signal.

But when I looked into the concentration of potassium on the inside of the cell, it wasn't all that great.

So I'm afraid that we're not gonna be able to get a signal. So I said, Cope, I may be able to help you out there,

Cope. He said, what are you talking about, Damadian? I said, look, Freeman, I know of a bacteria that lives in the

Dead Sea that has 20 times the normal potassium in it.

And that should overcome your concern about an insufficient amount of potassium to generate a signal for our experiments.

I said, he says, well, Damadian, do you know where you can get your hands on that bacteria?

I said, well, I don't know, Cope. I'll look into it and see if I can find it.

I've read about it in the literature. So I tracked down the literature and I found a source and I called

Cope back. I said, look, I got this bacteria from the Dead Sea. It's called

Halobacter halobium. I can get it and we can do the experiment. This is the only, the

Dead Sea is the only place that this bacteria is found? I don't know if it's the only place, but it's famous for the

Dead Sea. This is all remarkable. I think God has a sense of humor here. No, no, it's really quite amazing.

And there's another interesting aspect of this that you'll find interesting. When you normally do this as a biochemist or a bacteriologist, when you grow these bacteria up, you grow them up in a liquid solution in a very large glass flask.

We call it a culture and it takes 20, 30 quarts of this culture and you grow them up in an incubator.

Now, when I grew up the E. coli bacteria, when they're fully grown, this 10 quarts of water changes from transparent liquid water to a cloudy white solution with my

E. coli bacteria in there. And now what happens is if I take that solution and I put 10 milliliters of that cloudy solution in a test tube and I spit it down in a centrifuge,

I get a pellet at the bottom of the test tube that is a white pellet and that is my

E. coli bacteria. Now, the curious aspect of this that's intriguing is that when

I, well, so now I'm working with this other bacteria, the Halobacter halobium, and when

I grow up a culture of it, instead of being a white cloudy culture, it's pink.

And when I take a 10 milliliter sample and spit it down, my pellet of bacteria is pink.

And the curious, intriguing aspect of that is if you ever go visit the

Dead Sea at dusk, the Dead Sea is pink at night.

Wow. Well, a lot more discoveries coming out of the

Dead Sea than we thought. So anyway, we went out to our company at a more specialist corporation in Pittsburgh in a suburb called

New Kensington where this company was. And I went to the

University of Pittsburgh. I had a colleague named Stanley Schultz who was a professor there.

And I asked him if I could grow up my bacteria in his chemistry laboratory. He said, sure.

So I went there with my bacteria and my

Halobacter halobium bacteria. And I grew them up in Dr. Schultz's laboratory in a big jug of solution.

And then I brought, and I spun them down in a test tube. And I have now my test tube with the pink pellets in the bottom.

And I brought them over to Dr. Cope, who was at the laboratory, in New Kensington.

And I gave them to Dr. Cope and he put them in the magnet and he instantly got a potassium signal.

And what he put into the magnet was a test tube with a small coil of wire wrapped around it that was the antenna for detecting these signals.

Hmm. And we're doing this at NMR Specialties Corporation in New Kensington, Pennsylvania.

And so I gave Cope my test tube with this pellet of pink bacteria.

And he puts this antenna around it and he puts it in the magnet at NMR Specialties Corporation and immediately gets a signal and he measures the amount of potassium in the test tube.

I said, Cope, I can't believe what you just did. He said, what are you talking about today? I said, let Cope. I said, I can't get over what you just did.

I've been measuring potassium now for years by wet chemistry and it takes me three, four days if I don't drop the tube.

And you take my same bacteria and you don't do anything to invade them.

You don't break them up, you don't dissolve them. You just put an antenna around the test tube and you get a radio signal from that potassium atom and you measure its chemistry and you do it in a matter of seconds.

I can't believe you did that, Cope. And he said, well, what are you talking about? I said, well, you know,

I just told you what I'm talking about. And I said, wait a minute,

Cope, I said, you did that chemistry by this technology called NMR entirely wirelessly, entirely without invading the sample at all, just with a wireless antenna.

I said, Cope, you realize that if we could ever do the same thing with an antenna wrapped around the human body, we'd be able to get the chemistry of every tissue in the body completely non -invasively.

We would spark an unprecedented revolution in medicine. Wow, in fact, we have to stop right there.

We're gonna go to another commercial break. I'm sorry, but we have to do, we have to have these commercial breaks because that's the only way we can remain on the air.

But that's a great place to pick up where we left off. That's a pretty fascinating moment in history there.

And if anybody would like to join us on the air, and I thank those who are waiting patiently to have their questions asked and their testimonies read.

So we will get to you as soon as we can, but we want Dr. Demedian, obviously, to get us further on in the story of this remarkable life -saving invention, the

MRI, before we take our listener comments and questions. But our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

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Iron Sharpens today. Welcome back, this is

Chris Arns, and if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours is Dr.

Raymond Damadian. He is the inventor of the MRI, an invention that has no doubt saved countless lives due to early detection of tumors and terminal illnesses where the proper treatment and surgery could be done in time, and we are delighted to have him as our guest for the very first time.

Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com, and we thank those of you who are already sent in your comments and questions who are patiently waiting, but Dr.

Damadian, before the break, you were at a really remarkable moment in history, and it seemed almost humorous that this individual, this scientist,

Dr. Cope, that you were working with, seemed to be totally unaware of the revolutionary thing that just occurred.

Well, that's right, and the thing that, I think I want to make clear, Chris, to you and to all of our users, is that the things that were developing as this, were miraculous, and it's unequivocal that the

Lord's hand was doing all this, because as I go through the rest of the story, you're gonna see it, all of a sudden, every time there was a peculiar spot, some miraculous thing took place, and we were able to take the next step.

I mean, when I was originally talking to different people in the scientific world, that this test tube analyzer,

I was gonna turn into a scanner of the human body, I was being ridiculed, you know, it's nonsense and absurd, so, but the

Lord made it happen. I mean, it's that simple. Hasn't scientific breakthrough and discovery always happened in the midst of other scientists laughing and mocking and discrediting the person who is coming up with the discovery?

Yeah, well, my favorite scripture on this is in Colossians 13, in Christ our head, all of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and the really fundamental historical truth of that is that all of these phenomenal, the great, the vast majority of the phenomenal scientific discoveries that gave us this colossal industrial evolution that we all live in and take for granted, they didn't occur in China and India, where there's no shortage of smart people.

They occurred in the nations that had Christ. Amen. Because, you know, where do you get these sudden ideas, and then where do you get the wisdom to develop them?

I mean, it's all directly in the Lord's hand, and you'll see more of it as I tell the story. Amen, and so this

Dr. Cope, by the way, his last name's C -O -P -E? Yes, let me, Freeman Thorndike Cope.

That's interesting, because just before the program, I was calling an old friend of mine. He used to be a member of the same church where I was a member back in the 80s and early 90s,

Calvary Baptist Church of Amityville. Dr. Kevin Cope, who I haven't spoken with in years, in over a decade,

I called him and left a message on his voicemail to contact me, because I wanted him to listen to this interview, and I had no idea that the scientist who was involved in this breakthrough with you was also named

Cope. That's just pretty amazing. Maybe they're related. Yeah, maybe they are. I mean, my pal, Freeman Cope, because we really became good buddies until he lost his life some years ago, he was a brilliant guy.

It's that simple. I can't say it any better than that. He was just brilliant, and he's the one who introduced me to Santa Marta technologies.

I didn't even know what it was at the time. And so, as I'm working with him, do you want me to continue the story?

Oh, yeah, where he had the antenna on the test tube, and he seemed to be totally oblivious that this was remarkable.

All right, so I said, Cope, listen. I said, this would mean that we could go ahead, in principle, in theory, make a big antenna like this little quarter -inch antenna you have wrapped around a test tube.

We could make a big antenna, put it around a human body, and we'd be able to go from one tissue next and, without ever invading the body, get the chemistry of all the tissues of the body.

And he said, oh, well, he said, the mating, he said, you know, everybody's gonna think you're nutso.

Yeah. And they did, right? That's right. No, he says,

I don't even know where you would start, the mating, where would you start? I said, well, Cope, now I got an idea.

He said, what are you talking about, the mating? I said, listen, Freeman, I know that the potassium chemistry of cancer tissue is distinctly abnormal relative to the amount of potassium in a healthy cell.

That the amount of potassium is distinctly different than it is in the inside of a healthy cell.

It has what they call an elevated amount of potassium. And I said, we should be able to do the chemistry of the cell and do it by NMR.

And since the potassium chemistry is abnormal, we should get an abnormal signal that would tell us that cancer is there.

And I got a hope that there's a chance of that, Cope, because the potassium content of cancer cells is distinctly abnormal from healthy cells.

And that's an established fact. So what would you do with that?

He said, I don't think you're gonna be able to get enough of a single look at the cancer tissue with that.

I said, well, I got an idea, Cope. I said, in all of the work I've done, I've never seen a big change in those ions like potassium and sodium, where I did not see that change accompanied by a change in the water of the cell.

So if the cancer tissue has an abnormal potassium, it also has to have an abnormal water structure.

And Cope, water is something where we can easily detect by NMR, because all of the chemistry that's being done around the world today is being done on H2O, because the hydrogen atom has a strong magnetic moment and gives a very strong signal.

So, Cope, what we should do is we should set up our apparatus to detect the water signal.

And if I'm right, the water radio signal, radio NMR signal from cancer tissue, should be different than the water radio signal from healthy tissue.

Well, I couldn't convince him to do that. He just didn't wanna do it. Hmm. So I went to the chairman and the president of this company, who had founded the company,

Paul Yiko, Y -A -G -K -O. The company had maybe 50 employees or 100 employees.

And I said, Paul, I said, I have this idea that maybe I can use your apparatus to detect cancer.

Can I come back with some cancer rats and cut the cancers out and put them in a test tubes in your

NMR equipment and see if I'm right, that there's gonna be an abnormal water signal from cancer tissue relative to normal tissue?

So he says, sure. Go ahead, man. So I went back to the university where I was still on a faculty there, and I grew up some rats that had cancer.

And I brought them back to NMR specialties in New Kensington. But the only complication

I had was Paul Yiko said, look, the main thing is that I'm limited in the number of personnel that I have, and I can't give you any personnel.

If you wanna go ahead with this, you gotta do it on your own. And I said, well, wait a minute,

Paul. I don't know how to run this machine. All I did was give Colt test tubes, and he ran the machine. I said, well, if you wanna do it, you gotta do it on your own.

Oh, I said, all right. He points me to a machine, hey, you can have this machine. So I said, all right,

I'm gonna have to learn how to run this machine. So I got the very complicated, those are very complicated electronic devices.

And the machine stood about six feet tall. It was about three feet deep and about four feet wide.

And that machine was attached to a magnet, and the magnet had a opening in it that was about two and a half inches.

And you took your test tube, and you put it inside this antenna, and you put it inside this magnet, and the antenna was connected to this big

NMR apparatus, electronic apparatus that I'm describing from you. And when you got a signal, you looked at it on a oscilloscope, and you saw this sine wave that decayed over time that's called the

NMR signal. So I said, all right, I gotta learn how to make this thing work. So I took ordinary solutions of potassium chloride, sodium chloride, water, and I operated the apparatus to get a signal of water, to get a water signal from this apparatus that I had never used before.

And it took me a couple of, I think it was about a week of continually working on this apparatus to like to get my own signal, because I didn't have cope anymore.

So I did it for about a week, and I made up standard solutions. And after a while, I was confident that I was making accurate measurements of the water signal on this apparatus that I hadn't used before.

And I was proceeding to the point that I was doing it reliably. All right, so okay, all right, now

I'll cut the tumors out of my rats, and I'll put them in the tube, and I'll cut the normal tissues, and I'll look at the signal, and I'll see if there's any difference in how fast the two signals decay.

Is the decay time of the cancer tissue signal, the cancer tissue water signal, going to be any different from the decay time of the signal from the healthy tissue?

So I put the healthy tissue in, and I measured the decay time, which the fancy name for it is the relaxation time.

And then I put the cancer tissue in a test tube from the rat into the

NMR magnet, and I measured the decay time. And to my amazement, it wasn't a little bit different, it was dramatically different.

I said, holy smokes, this thing, this thing's really gonna work. Oh, so I did it then a lot more carefully, and I decided, well,

I couldn't just leave it to one tumor, so I had to go back to Brooklyn and grow up some more rats with a different kind of tumor.

The, that one, the first one I did was a Walker sarcoma, and I went back to Brooklyn, and I grew up some more rats with cancers of the liver that was a

Novikov hepatoma. And I brought them back, and I measured the decay time of the

NMR radio signal from the cancer tissue of the rat liver tumor, and it measured 835 milliseconds.

And when I measured the decay time of the normal liver, it measured 400 milliseconds.

So holy smokes, it's twice the decay time of the healthy tissue.

And I got that, and then when I looked at the Walker sarcoma, the corresponding healthy tissue was normal muscle, and I was getting something like 800 plus on the

Walker sarcoma, and on the muscle I was getting like 500 milliseconds. So both tumors were turning out to have substantially delayed decay times in their nuclear radio signals that I was getting non -invasively from these test tube samples.

So the first step that I had postulated was working, but there was one other discovery which

I didn't expect, and that was I had to measure the decay time of all the healthy tissues, the healthy soft tissues of these vital organs, because without knowing what the normal was,

I would have no way of judging what the abnormal, I would have no way of judging what was abnormal.

So I had to go ahead and measure this same decay time, this relaxation time as it's called, of all the healthy soft tissues.

And to my amazement, there was also a dramatic difference amongst the healthy soft tissues themselves.

So when I measured the decay time of normal intestinal tissue, I got 285 milliseconds.

When I measured the decay time of brain tissue, I got 600 milliseconds, a dramatic difference just in the soft tissues.

And all of the other healthy tissues like muscle, kidney, liver, lied in between the 285 milliseconds and the 600 milliseconds.

Now that turned out to be extremely potent, and I was completely unexpected. And the reason it turned out to be completely potent was, as I told you, when we make these images, the images composed of these dots, which we call picture elements or pixels, and if those pixels do not have different brightness than your image, all the 65 ,000 pixels are gonna have the same brightness, so your image is gonna be a blank.

Now here, I'm suddenly seeing a big difference in these decay times of the healthy tissues.

Holy smokes, it might mean that if I was able to make a picture of the healthy tissues, they're gonna have a dramatic difference in pixel brightness, and all of a sudden, for the first time in medical history,

I'm gonna see detail in medical images of the vital organs of the body. Wow.

So how did this actually come to fruition with the actual physical MRI invention that you came up with?

Obviously, you needed a prototype to begin with. Oh yeah, well, right now, I'm still on test tubes. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Okay, but I mean, the signals are turning out to show like it really could do something.

So I go back now to the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, and I'm continuing my research there, and I was able to get a grant to do my research because I had published now in Science that the

NMR signal from cancer tissue was dramatically different than the NMR signal from healthy tissue, and this would mean the possibility that you might be able to build a magnet big enough to put a human being into instead of a test tube, and that you would have a brand new scanner of the human body that would overcome all the deficiencies of x -ray.

So I went back to the university, and I was continuing my research just on the test tubes.

I hadn't gotten the daring to go ahead and try to build a human magnet at that point, and curiously enough, at that very instant in time,

President Nixon was president, and he declared his war on cancer, and he told the whole world that I'm gonna put forward $6 billion, $1 billion a year, to be spent on cancer research to commence my war on cancer.

So I said, boy, I got excited about that. I can continue to do this research, and I sent the grant into the

National Cancer Institute, and the grant was rejected.

And I was furious. I said, wait a minute. I got this major discovery on cancer tissue.

You're spending a billion dollars a year, and I can't even get it done. So I called up the

National Cancer Institute. I said, this is absurd. I said,

I have this major discovery, and you're turning it down at the same time you're spending a billion dollars a year in cancer research.

So the chief manager of the

Cancer Institute says, well, tell me a little bit more about your project. I told him,

I said, all right, all right, all right. We'll finance it. We'll fund it. So it's about this time that I said, or when

I thought I was out of money, I said, well, I'm not gonna be able to do my research. I'll go ahead and try to build this magnet that I dreamed of.

And so now all of a sudden I'm gonna build this 50 -inch magnet to try to make it work so I can scan the human body.

So the next thing that I do then is I'm starting to build the magnet with my graduate students,

Larry Minkoff and Michael Goldsmith. And we're now working together on this. And I quickly, it becomes self -evident very quickly that I can't build this magnet.

The way I'm gonna build a magnet is that I'm gonna use a wire coil and I'm gonna run current into this wire coil.

And when current runs in the wire coil in a circle, it creates a magnetic field that runs along the axis of the coil.

So if I'm gonna build this magnet, now I'm gonna build this giant coil that I'm gonna put electricity into.

And it's gonna generate the magnetic field that I want. Well, I quickly realized I can't use wire to make this coil because ordinary copper wire has resistance.

And when I did my computer calculations about the amount of wire and the amount of current that I could put into the wire,

I realized that I wasn't gonna be able to, because of the copper wire and its resistance, when

I tried to put the thousands of amperes that I had calculated I needed, the copper wire would burn up from the resistance to the flow of electricity.

So I said, oh, I'm not gonna be able to use copper wire. All right, I know what I can do.

I can use superconducting wire, which was a new technological conductor at the time.

And it had the unique property, it was made of an alloy called niobium titanium.

And it had the unique property that if you cooled it to ultra low temperatures, nameless minus, namely minus 269 degrees centigrade, that wire would superconduct and it would conduct electricity with zero resistance.

And that wire would allow me now to put thousands of amperes in, where if I use copper wire,

I was only gonna be able to get 150 amperes. So I said, all right, I will try to make this magnet out of this liquid helium cooled superconducting magnet, but it's gonna mean that I'm gonna have to make a giant refrigerator to cool the liquid helium that I'm gonna put the wire into.

And that giant refrigerator, which we refer to as a cryo generator of cold.

So I proceeded then with the designs to try to build this giant so I could use the niobium titanium wire.

And I didn't have the money at the time to buy the wire.

So I said, all right, well, one of the things I knew was the wire did not come all on one spool.

So while I'm busy trying to figure out, when I did the calculations of how much of this niobium titanium wire

I was gonna need, my calculations brought the result that I needed 30 miles of wire.

$150 ,000, 150 ,000 feet of this niobium titanium wire.

That's what my calculations showed me. But when I looked into the price of the wire, it was a dollar a foot.

That meant I was gonna have to come up with $150 ,000. In fact, this is where we're gonna take our final break.

And when we return from the break, obviously we're going to have to speed up the story a little bit because we only have a half hour left when we return from the break.

And by the way, we're running a little late today. We're gonna run the program till 624 because of the fact that we started late due to the power outage.

So that will explain why we are going overtime. But if this is your last opportunity, if you would like to join us on the air with a question or comment, and we still are going to eventually get to those of you who have already written in, so don't panic.

We'll get to you as soon as possible. But our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. Ray Damadian and more of his fascinating testimony. Iron Sharpens Iron Radio is sponsored by Harvey Cedars, a year -round

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Welcome back, this is Chris Arns, and if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the entire two hour time, with about 24 minutes to go now, has been and will be

Dr. Ray Damadian, the inventor of the MRI, which has been used to save countless lives.

And we are going through his fascinating testimony and the journey of his discovery and invention of this remarkable, this history making invention, the

MRI. And before we return to that discussion, I just have a couple of very brief announcements.

Some of you may be aware and some of you may not be aware that Nabeel Qureshi, who is a

Christian apologist, he's a Muslim convert to Christianity, who is a very dear friend of David Wood, a close friend of mine who has been on this program innumerable times.

David Wood is also a Christian apologist who specializes in Islamic studies and has debated

Muslims all over the world. He led Nabeel Qureshi to Christ in their college years, and Nabeel became an apologist as well.

And he is a published author, works for Ravi Zacharias Ministries. Well, sadly,

Nabeel Qureshi has been diagnosed with late stage terminal stomach cancer.

And according to Nabeel, the prognosis is grim. If you could pray for Nabeel, not only for a miraculous healing physically, but also that his faith would be strengthened and that his family and loved ones would be comforted during this time of trial.

Also, I just want to quickly remind you that Iron Sharpens Iron Radio is in urgent need of advertising dollars.

So if you know of a business, a professional firm, a church or ministry that would like to advertise with us, please let me know at chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Even if you know of any philanthropists or very generous individuals, benevolent individuals who may want to donate to Iron Sharpens Iron, we would appreciate it because we need the funds urgently to remain on the air.

And that email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

And before I go directly to the discussion with Dr. Damadian, I just wanted to read a couple of brief testimonies of listeners.

We have Aaron in Indianapolis, Indiana, who says, just a testimony of deep gratitude to men of God, such as Dr.

Damadian. This time last year, a mammography and an MRI helped detect the most minuscule of cells that were precancerous.

A quick outpatient surgery and a little radiation later, and I'm as good as new.

It's been a year of praise and gratitude to a merciful, loving God, whose provisions are for our good and his glory.

Well, thank you very much, Aaron. And we also have Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island, New York who writes, when

I was 12 years old, I was in an almost fatal accident with an 18 -wheeler semi truck.

I remember coming out with some neck pain. An MRI was used to show that I had two dislocated discs in my vertebrae to be able to know the issue on hand, what was caused effective treatment to be applied quickly.

Thank you, Dr. Damadian, and thank God and God bless you. And finally, we have an anonymous listener in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who says that an

MRI saved her life through the early detection of cancerous cells that were successfully treated.

I am now cancer -free, and I ask your forgiveness for remaining anonymous, but I do not want to identify myself as a cancer patient any longer since I am cancer -free and do not want that to be a part of my ongoing identity since I battled it for such a considerable amount of time.

And thank you, Dr. Damadian, and thank God. So that's all we have time to go to right now.

And Dr. Damadian, if you could return to the discussion where we left off, you needed to raise about $150 ,000 to buy this wire that was essential to what you were doing in this profound breakthrough in science that you had come upon.

All right, so we're back where I originally said that we're using the wonderful discovery that the famous legend, the

God -loving famous legend of science, Michael Faraday made, namely that when you run electricity in a coil of wire, it generates a magnetic field.

So we're back to building this magnetic field that we're gonna run electricity in to doing it.

And when I sat down and we had come to the conclusion that I explained before that it couldn't be ordinary copper wire.

It had to be NBTI, nioleate titanium wire, and it was gonna cost $150 ,000 and I only had $15 ,000 in my budget.

What am I gonna do about that? Well, I gotta go out and try to solicit people and see if I can get them to give us a funding grant to get this kind of money.

But I didn't, it was gonna take a while to do that. I didn't know how long it was gonna take me to try to raise $150 ,000.

So anyway, I said, all right, well, I have another need too at the same time.

The wire that I'm gonna get of this nioleate titanium wire doesn't come all on one spool. It comes on 20 or 30 spools that I'm gonna need in order to make this 30 foot wire magnet.

And that wire, when I put it in liquid helium is gonna superconduct so I can put 1000 amps in it.

However, if I got 30 spools of wire that I'm gonna use, I have to make a joint from one spool to the next spool to the next spool of spectral.

And when I make this joint between successive lengths of wire, I can't introduce a resistance to the flow of current when

I make that joint or I'll lose the superconductivity that I desperately need in the wire.

So I, okay, I know what I'll do. I'll call up Westinghouse and ask them to show me how to make the joints so that I can make successive joints of superconducting wire without injecting resistance.

So I know what I'll do. I'll call up the Westinghouse sales engineer that I bought my other magnets from,

Steve Lane, and ask him at least to start how to make these joints. So I call

Steve Lane at Westinghouse. I said, Steve, will you teach me how to make these joints of successive superconducting wire?

He's, wait, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute, Dr. Lane, are you guys going into competition with Westinghouse?

I said, no, no, no, no, wait a minute, Steve. I said, I'm trying to build successive lengths of wire into a big enough magnet to put a human being into so that I can go ahead and try to make a scanner of the live human body.

So Steve Lane says to me, well, it's a good thing you're level with me, Dr. Lane, and I'll share something with you that nobody yet knows.

Westinghouse is going out of the business of making superconducting, and I hadn't told him anything about the amount of wire that I needed.

Westinghouse is going out of the business of making superconducting wire. Nobody knows about it yet.

And I happen to have roughly in the neighborhood of 30 miles of this niobium titanium wire in the warehouse, which

I will let you have, when you hear this, I will let you have for 10 cents on the dollar.

Wow. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. And he said, when do you want it?

I said, how about right now? So he says, all right, come get it.

So I got my two graduate students, Larry Minkoff and Mike Goldsmith, they got in a van and they drove out to get the wire.

And they brought the wire back. And so a few days later, I'm talking about this with my mother -in -law and father -in -law, both of whom are

Evangelical Christians, and I'm saying, I said, I can't, mom, I said, I can't believe this story.

I said, the very instant that I need this wire, Westinghouse, after 24 years of making this wire, is deciding to go out of business so I can have it at 10.

What an astounding coincidence. And my mother -in -law says to me, that's not a coincidence,

Raymond. I said, what are you talking about? She said, that's not a coincidence. Ever since your father and I discovered that you were trying to do this and build this scanner or magnet, we've been praying for it.

We've been preparing for this to be an experiment, and this is not a coincidence, it's an answer to prayer.

Praise God. This is amazing. And we went out, and we went out, and we got the wire, and we built the magnet.

Now, and of course, then, the next piece is, I don't know if you want me to do that right now or if you have an interruption, but the next piece is trying to do a human being in this magnet that we built.

Yeah, I'm wondering who volunteered for that. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. So you want me to proceed?

Yes, we have 17 minutes, so you could speak, and then obviously, we're gonna have to wrap up in about 12 minutes or so.

So you're looking forward to hoping that this will end in 12 minutes.

Yes, ha ha ha, that's exactly right. All right, well, okay, so what we did then,

Chris, is we went ahead and we built the magnet based on, because of this wire that I was able to get from Steve Lane at Wessinghouse, and we cooled it down with liquid helium, and when it came to the great moment of history as to who would get in there, nobody would get in there.

You didn't know. You're just standing in this big, strong magnet. You're gonna have a, are you gonna have an abnormal cardiac rhythm?

Are you gonna have, nobody knew what it was gonna be like if you got in this magnet, and it was finally decided by some matter of consensus that the person who most deserved this opportunity was yours truly, so I agreed to get into the magnet, and so I went in to get into the magnet, and now the key was, when

I was in the magnet, now I, by the way, I had a cardiologist present with defibrillator shock paddles, and I had all the possible emergency apparatus present, and I got into the magnet, and we put this antenna that Mike Goldsmith had made, this copper wire that was the antenna to go around my torso, and Mike Goldsmith and Larry put it around me, and I got into the magnet, and I'm sitting there, sitting there, and we're trying to get a signal from my body, hydrogen signal from the water of my tissue, and we're, all we're getting out of Raymond Damadian is a normal EKG, because I had been hooked up to an

EKG just for safety purposes, but no signal, and after we're struggling, struggling, struggling, finally

Goldsmith, who weighs about 400 pounds, had the temerity to say that it wasn't working, because I was too fat for his coil, and that's, and I was, my fatness was loathing the impedance of his receiver detector coil, and therefore, that's why we were not getting a signal, so we were stumped at that point.

Is it the Goldsmith hypothesis, or there's something wrong in all of this, in all the technologies we put together?

Well, the only way to test the Goldsmith hypothesis was to get somebody a lot skinnier than Dr.

Damadian, and our other collaborator,

Larry Minkoff, fit the bill perfectly, he was skinny as a rail, but he wouldn't get in there.

No! So this went on and on for the better part of a week to two weeks,

I don't remember exactly, with Goldsmith and I continually trying to inspire

Larry Minkoff to get in the coil to test the Goldsmith too fat hypothesis.

Finally, back and forth, back and forth, We get in, he comes in one day and says, okay, okay,

I'll get in there just to test the two -fat hypothesis, the Goldsmith two -fat hypothesis, to see if we can get a signal from me, where we couldn't get it from you.

So I set it up. Now, one more thing that was important here was

I had designed the magnet so that it would only give a signal from a sample

I put in a specific spot. Remember, the antenna was gonna be entirely around my whole torso, and in theory, unless I did something to focus it, it was gonna collect signals from all the atoms in my torso, because the antenna was collecting from all the atoms from my whole torso.

So I had designed it so that it was focused, and I had the RF coil designed so that it would only give a signal from the dead center of the magnet in a volume that was about the size of a beam.

And any time I moved the sample outside the beam, the way I had it set up and designed, the signal would go away, so I could be sure where I was located when

I was getting that signal. Okay, so we put

Larry into the magnet, and by the time we got all this working, it was the midnight of July 3rd, it was the midnight of July 2nd, crossing into July 3rd, that Larry finally got into the magnet, and I set it up so that this focus spot that I had in the center of the magnet was in the center of Larry's chest, where it would be in the center of Larry's heart, that was full of blood, and therefore full of H2O.

And therefore, we're in a spot in Larry's chest we should get a strong signal.

So by the time we got Larry in there, it was midnight of July 2nd, Larry gets into the magnet, and we put him just where I told you, so that the focus spot, the dead center of the magnet, is in the center of Larry's, and to my total astonishment, we got a signal from Larry's, we got a signal from Larry's chest which we had failed on me.

Wow. So now the next question was, was it gonna focus and give us, allow us to focus the spot and move it from one spot to the next so we could get a scan and make a map?

So the next step then was to move Larry over two inches, and now that focus spot would be in the center of Larry's lung, which instead of being filled with liquid, with signal generating

H2O, such as in Larry's heart, it was now in the lung full of gas.

And if this was gonna work, now the signal should go away.

So we had the signal when Larry was centered in the dead center of the magnet, and now the big acid test is coming as to whether or not this scan is gonna work, because we moved

Larry over two inches, and if it's working, and if the focus spot is working, the signal should now go away.

So I held my breath, and we all held our breath, and I said, okay, move

Larry over two inches. And we moved him over two inches, and to my complete astonishment, the signal went away, and I said, holy smokes, it's actually gonna work.

And Larry Minkoff disagrees with that statement, and he insists that the word was not smokes.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Well, we have a

Christian audience, so I'm glad that you didn't use the actual word there on air.

Anyway, we moved these points stepwise across Larry's chest at one level.

Larry is sitting up when we're doing this, so as we move from point to point, we're marking, we're mapping out a slice across Larry's chest that is a slice at right angles to his body, and it's at the height of what we call

T8, the eighth thoracic vertebra. So we're now mapping out a slice one spot at a time across Larry's chest, a slice across his chest at the level of the eighth thoracic vertebra, and we collected 106 of these signals from all these different spots.

And we had on our team a computer scientist, Joel Stutman, and so we gave all the numbers that we got from each of the spots, and we asked

Joel now to put the spots up on a screen and then interpolate the spaces between the spots so we could convert the 106 spots to an image, which

Joel Stutman, Dr. Joel Stutman did, and to our great exhilaration, we had just achieved the world's first ever

MRI scan of a human being. Praise God. And the Lord has used that to -

It was the Lord all the way through. I mean, he just did it. It's amazing. And then he made me do it.

Now, I'm turning away. I'm going, I'm gonna quit. I'm doing something else. And all of a sudden, it shuts off my contract.

Well, this is a truly remarkable story, and those of you who took the time to write in with your questions and testimonies, you're all going to get a free copy of this book,

Gifted Mind, which has been co -authored between Jeffrey Kinley and our guest,

Dr. Raymond Damadian. Chris, there's one more piece. It'll only take me a minute.

Sure. But everybody's gonna wanna know, because we're now, we have this magnet that we called Indomitable in the university, and how does it ever become a commercial product, a genuine

MRI scanner? So the very next step then was in 1978.

We opened the doors of our founding, beginning company, and we proceeded to make the first ever commercial magnet.

And now this magnet was gonna be a very different magnet, because I was worried that if we try to build it out as liquid helium and everything else, when we go ahead and make this commercial magnet and ship it out to everybody, the magnet helium would blow off.

It would quench all the kinds of problems we would have. So we decided to make a new magnet, and instead of making it out of liquid helium -cooled wire, we would make it out of permanent magnet bricks, the kind of magnets you stick on the refrigerator door.

And so we went ahead and engineered a magnet made out of bricks instead of out of wire, and we introduced the first ever commercial magnet in 1980, the one we called the

QED -80, that which was meant to be proved, the QED -80, and that became the first ever commercial

MRI. After that, the big companies came in and they copied us. That's more story with patent fights and everything else, but that was the first commercial

MRI, the QED -80, which we were able to introduce, which was a magnet built out of magnet bricks in 1980.

Well, let me just let our listeners know that you were awarded a National Medal of Technology in 1988 and that you were inducted into the

National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989. And in 2001, the

Lemelson -MIT Prize Program bestowed its Lifetime Achievement Award on Dr.

Damadian as the man who invented the MRI scanner. The Franklin Institute of Philadelphia gave its recognition of Dr.

Damadian's work on MRI with the Bower Award in Business Leadership, and Dr.

Damadian was named the Knights of Vartan 2003 Man of the Year. In September of 2003, he was honored with the

Innovation Award in Bioscience from The Economist, and his original MRI full -body scanner was donated to the

Smithsonian Institute in the 1980s and is now on loan and on display at the

National Inventors Hall of Fame in Ohio. Dr. Damadian, were you able to get over the hijacking of the

Nobel Peace Prize that occurred with this invention? Ha ha, well, that was painful.

It wasn't the Peace Prize. It was the Nobel Prize in Physiology. Right, I'm sorry.

And I was painful because after we had given our lives to making this happen, the

Nobel Committee comes along and writes us out of the history of MRI, which we knew personally wouldn't exist if we hadn't lived.

You know, we knew that if there was no Damadian in our group there would be no

MRI, that simple. So they did the wrong thing. The Nobel, from our perspective, the

Nobel Committee in Physiology and Medicine was untruthful. But there were obviously, as I just listed, there were enough credible sources that did bestow upon you very wonderful awards for this invention that God, as I keep repeating, has used and I'm sure will continue to use for many years to come.

Chris, there's another piece that I think's important. Sure. I made this discovery, as I told you, with NMR Specialties Corporation in New Kensington.

And there was another scientist that was on the board of directors there whose name was Paul Lauterbur.

And when Lauterbur saw my results, and there was another person, a

Syrian, who repeated my results some weeks later, and Lauterbur, a chemist, saw my results.

He said, wait a minute. Those differences that the median has discovered in the signal, we can use them to make a picture.

Because as of the time of what I was doing, I hadn't made a picture. And in 1973, he published a paper, said, well, wait a minute.

We can use those differences to make a picture. And he made a picture of two small test tubes.

So now, there was some tension that developed between us because he got all this directly from me.

And when he published his first paper talking about the picture in a scan, he didn't cite us, he didn't cite my paper, which is where the signals to make the image came from.

So he was using the signals I discovered to make the image. And when you looked at his paper, there was no reference to me or my work, who he knew me very well.

He knew me personally. So real tension developed as a result of that.

And then people started coming to me and talking about how they wanted to nominate me for the Nobel Prize from the

Nobel Committee itself, were talking to us. And what he ended up telling people, sadly, because he did make a beautiful contribution, was that if the median got the

Nobel Prize, he would turn it down. And that became within the process of privacy of the

Nobel Committee, that became a consideration for them. So that was the complication.

Well, this is obvious. I wanna make sure when I talk about Lautenberg, is that he's the first one to suggest we can make a picture from the median's signals.

And he deserves the credit for that. But he's probably part of the reason why the

Nobel Committee made the mistake they made, because they didn't commit themselves to the truth.

I mean, they just did it on truth. Well, that's very honorable and very humble of you to give him the credit that he is due, even though he perhaps was involved in this very dishonest development.

And that only gives further proof to the theological truth of the total depravity of man, and that we need

Jesus Christ to rescue us from ourselves, let alone the world of flesh and the devil.

But I know that this book can be purchased at masterbooks .com, masterbooks .com.

As I said earlier, all of those who took the time to write in their testimonies are getting a free copy.

In fact, there were three people who were waiting that we never had an opportunity to read.

Chris, there's another tidbit of the story that you'll enjoy. I think I can tell it quickly. Sure. I said, after we did and we made the first discovery and published it in Science, the

National Cancer Institute put out a contract. And we got the contract, Lauterberg got the contract, and a third scientist at Hopkins got the contract.

And we went ahead and did our research, and the National Cancer Institute held a big national conference on cancer diagnosis, one part of which was

NMR, for the three contractees, myself and Lauterberg and this third person who

I'll spare naming him. And so they asked me to get up and talk, and I said, well, I had been able to repeat my studies in tissues from a live mouse.

Then Dr. Hazelwood, who had been one of the contractees, got up and he said, I repeated the

Dominion's experiments. I got the same abnormal T1 and T2 that Dominion did. And then the third professor from Hopkins got up and he said, well,

I repeated the tissue experiments of Dominion of T1 and T2, and I got the same abnormal

T1s and T2s that Dominion did from cancer tissue, but I also did disease tissue where I measured the disease tissue that was not cancerous, and I also got abnormal

T1s and T2s from disease tissue that was not cancerous, like I did for the cancerous tissue.

Therefore, ladies and gentlemen of the National Cancer Institute, any further discussion about scanning the human body by NMR is visionary nonsense.

Now, there were three professors from Hopkins who were sitting in that audience when the

National Cancer Conference, and their hands shot up, they were MDs from Hopkins, and they said,

Dr. X, if you can just tell us where to put the needle, we are way ahead of where we are today,

Dr. X. Now, later on, a few years later, we end up in a patent battle with General Electric where we were trying to assert our patents so we could have the benefits to keep them from eating us alive, which we were doing at the time, and when we ended up in the court before the federal district court and the court of appeals, they said, their lawyers said, well, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this discovery of the median is not unique to cancer.

You get the same abnormal signal from disease tissue that's not cancerous as you get from cancerous tissue, the same abnormal signal from disease tissue that's not cancerous as you get from cancerous tissue, and our lawyers then stood up and said, well, wait a minute, ladies and gentlemen, are you gonna punish this guy because his original discovery detects more disease than he originally envisioned?

Hmm, wow. And then we won. Amen, well, praise God for that. I always love to hear when the righteous are vindicated, and as I said, our listeners can get this book from mastersbooks .com,

mastersbooks .com. The title of the book is Gifted Mind, and this is a biography of Dr.

Raymond Demedian written by Jeff Kinley and co -authored by Dr. Demedian, and of course, you could go to Amazon.

Do you have any other contact information that you personally wanna share with our listeners? Or would you rather our listeners just go through me?

Dr. Demedian? I didn't hear you, Chris, what'd you say? I said, do you have any other website or contact information at all that you want me to share with our listeners?

No, I think if you just. That's quite all right. Yeah, well, if anybody wants to get in contact with.

Just Gifted Mind and Amazon. Yes, yes. Amazon's got it, you'll bring it right up.

Right, and also masterbooks .com. Also, you can, if you enter into Google the inventor of the

MRI, just enter those words, the inventor of the MRI, the book comes up.

Oh, great. And one more thing. Alternatively, you can enter Raymond Demedian, and the book also comes up, the

Gifted Mind. Yeah, that's D -A -M -A -D -I -A -N. Right, so in either entry, the

Raymond Demedian or the inventor of the MRI, either one of them, the

Gifted Mind book comes up, and you can order it right on the web. Great, well,

I would love it if you could stay on the phone for a few minutes after we go off the air, because I want to say a final goodbye to you, but I want to thank you so much for being a part of our broadcast today.

I want to thank everybody who got involved with their own testimonies. I'm sorry we couldn't get to everybody, but I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater