Raymond Damadian had many options as a young man: he was a skilled enough violinist to enter the Juilliard School of Music, athletic enough in tennis to compete in Junior Davis Cup events. But he also had a keen interest in medicine sparked by the drawn-out suffering his maternal grandmother experienced from cancer.

"I watched the cancer get progressively more foul, and for months after she died, I could still hear the moaning," he says.

What he didn't envision was being the inventor of a device that revolutionized medicine?the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, which opens the living body to noninvasive diagnosis. Or that President Ronald Reagan would award him the National Medal of Technology for his invention or that he would be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, alongside such men as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.

At age fifteen, Damadian received a Ford Foundation scholarship and began studies at the University of Wisconsin where he majored in math and minored in chemistry. By the end of his sophomore year, he had decided on medical school, and after graduation, began his studies at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York City.

During his first year, Damadian found himself being more interested in finding the cause, not amelioration, of disease. At the urging of one of his professors, Damadian concentrated on research.

During the summer of that year, Damadian met Donna Terry, who worked at a soda fountain close to the exclusive hotel where he was teaching tennis. Donna invited Damadian to the 1957 Billy Graham crusade at Madison Square Garden. Sitting in the balcony so far from the stage that they could hardly see the evangelist didn't prevent Damadian from hearing his message and responding to the altar call.

"I felt that what he was saying?that the Scripture presents an unequivocal mandate to be born again?was so. I hadn't dealt with that in an explicitly conscious way."

Damadian had grown up in a church-going family and was president of the church youth group. But he had never made a personal commitment to Christ.

A week after he graduated from medical school, Raymond and Donna married. Then it was a year's residency at Kings County Hospital in New York, a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, and then on to Harvard University for postdoctorate work. After two years in the Air Force, Damadian joined the faculty of the State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences Center in Brooklyn, eventually becoming associate professor of biophysics and internal medicine.

Bigger plans In 1969, Damadian had opportunities to use a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer in his biophysics research. It was a technology discovered in the 1940s but had been limited to experimental use because nothing larger than a pencil could be placed within the circular magnet. Working with the device, Damadian had an idea: if you build an NMR large enough to scan a human body, it could help detect cancer cells.

It was like "going from a paper glider to a 747," he says now. In June 1970, Damadian conducted further experiments with rats?healthy and cancerous?on the small NMR to see if the machine could differentiate between the cells. It could. Aware of the magnitude of his discovery, Damadian set his sights on building a large-scale scanner that would perform magnetic resonance imaging.