Greedy Smarty

Can't believe this. Wrote the Daily Illini today, an ad posted in the NYTimes said that the Nobel prize awarded to Prof. Lauterbur a couple of months ago was a mistake. It says "The Noble Prize will make itself irrelevant to the true history of the MRI [magnetic resonance imaging -- Aco]. It will also lose its credibility as an award for scientific achievement". Lauterbur is a U of I professor. He co-won the Noble with Dr. Peter Mansfield of the U of Nottingham, England. This ad says, it should have been Dr. Raymond Damadian who got the Noble. I know nothing about MRI (newspapers teach: it is "a process in which a scanner picks up different tissue cells within the human body and projects them as an image in order to detect cancer cells earlier" -- whatever), but this news strikes me as that even high-level intellectuals can be so greedy. The poster, Fonar Corp (a manufacturer of MRI scanners) even dedicates a full page for the controversy. Fonar is Damadian's company. Money. But they say, it's not: "Sorry, we didn’t think the Nobel Prize is about money. We thought it is about the unprejudiced recognition of scientific achievement. So egregiously flawed is this policy that Alfred Nobel himself, who held 355 patents, would not qualify for his own prize!". Wow, that's a strong one. Dr. Lauterbur has no comment on this cheap campaign. He'd better not.