In the summer of 1977, the day before Independence Day, physician Raymond Damadian watched as his mechanical invention (dubbed “The Indomitable”) produced a crude image of the internal structures of a living human’s chest. That human, Larry Minkoff, was one of Damadian’s postgraduate students at SUNY Downstate Medical Center.
This moment would accelerate the creation of one of the most revolutionary medical innovations in history: the MRI scan. But the science behind the innovation was decades in the making.
