The spectator sport of Nobel watching, especially for the science prizes, is a fall tradition, and this season has been unusually lively. On Oct. 6, the Nobel committee awarded the prize in physiology or medicine to Paul Lauterbur, of the University of Illinois, and Sir Peter Mansfield, of the University of Nottingham, for the invention of magnetic resonance imaging, the widely used diagnostic technology usually called M.R.I. Controversy erupted.
Full-page advertisements appeared in The Washington Post and The New York Times headlined ''The Shameful Wrong That Must Be Righted'' and charging at angry length that the Nobel committee was trying to rewrite history. In what way? By failing to include Raymond V. Damadian, who says in the ads that it was he who discovered M.R.I. and that Dr. Lauterbur and Sir Peter merely refined the technology.
While it's true that Dr. Damadian took an early first step in M.R.I. and holds a basic patent, many scientists, and the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute, maintain that the two laureates were indeed the ones whose work led directly to the present technology. But putting aside Dr. Damadian's claim, how have Nobel committees dealt with what may be called precursor discoveries?
Predecessors have been included in Nobels several times. In 1945, Ernst B. Chain and Sir Howard Florey got the prize in physiology or medicine for penicillin, and shared it with Sir Alexander Fleming, who indeed first observed the antibiotic properties of the mold that makes the stuff, but never developed it. In 1975, Howard Temin and David Baltimore were honored for the simultaneous, independent discovery of reverse transcriptase, an enzyme that translates RNA back into DNA; many viruses, notably H.I.V., employ reverse transcriptase when infecting animal cells. Renato Dulbecco was the third man in this one, and although he had taught the two certain methods they exploited, he had taken no part in the work itself. In 1986 Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer received the physics prize for the scanning tunneling electron microscope; they shared it with Ernst Ruska, who had invented the device's remote ancestor, the first electron microscope, in 1933. All these cases would seem relevant to Dr. Damadian's complaint.
Yet deserving scientists have all too frequently been skipped over. Lise Meitner, the physicist first to recognize that experiments reported by two former colleagues in Berlin meant that atoms had been split, never got a prize, even though one of those colleagues, Otto Hahn, did in 1944. Arne Tiselius, himself a laureate (chemistry, 1948), and a big player in Nobel deliberations at the Karolinska, admitted that the most conspicuous omission was Oswald Avery, the first to establish that genes are made not of protein but of DNA. Many regret that Rosalind Franklin, whose data James Watson and Francis Crick used to elucidate the structure of DNA in 1953, died before the prize went to them in 1962; the third scientist in that prize was Maurice Wilkins, whose crucial contribution to the discovery itself was to show Dr. Franklin's X-ray-diffraction photograph of a DNA molecule to Dr. Watson.
And there are many predecessors who have been left out. In 1974, when Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish were awarded the physics prize for discovery of pulsars, the cosmologist Fred Hoyle rose in wrath at the omission of Jocelyn Bell, the student astronomer who had made the initial radio-telescope observation that led to the discovery. Miss Bell, now Dr. Bell Burnell, has serenely ignored the claim. Erwin Chargaff was not so quiet. In the late 1940's, he investigated the biochemistry of DNA and published certain facts that he did not himself interpret but that were explained by the Watson-Crick structure. Dr. Chargaff wrote to scientists all over the world about his exclusion and became a bitter polemicist against molecular biology.
There are others, too proud to raise the issue, and too aware of the spectacle they'd make. I know a scientist who discovered a biological phenomenon, wrote it up -- and had publication of his report delayed for months by a doubting editor. Meanwhile, another scientist made the same discovery, wrote a paper that indeed acknowledged receiving materials and technical help from my acquaintance, but got into print first. Later, two other scientists developed the phenomenon into a powerful tool for genetic engineering. When they were awarded a Nobel prize, the third scientist included was that second discoverer. I will not identify the scientists or the phenomenon, for my acquaintance has never spoken publicly of the matter. His behavior stands in stark and elegant contrast to the noisy complaining of Raymond Damadian.