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2. Translating a Dream into Reality: Birth of MRI and Genesis of a “Big Science”
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2 Translating a Dream into Reality: Birth of MRI and Genesis of a “Big Science” MR imaging is fulfilling the promise of becoming the ultimate imaging technique. —Alexander Margulis and Jonathan Sunshine, “Radiology at the Turn of the Millennium ,” 2000 I take this opportunity to apologize to MRI pioneers in the audience because I never believed MRI would work, like Rutherford, who said anyone who believed nuclear radioactivity would be useful “is talking moonshine.” However, I was only one of the unbelievers. —Ervin L. Hahn, “NMR and MRI in Retrospect,” 1990 Celebration of MRI as “the ultimate imaging technique” is today neither uncommon nor unwarranted. But, in the 1970s, scientists and nonscientists alike were unsure whether it could ever be developed. Thus, when it came to MRI, even Ervin Hahn, one of the pioneers of NMR research, was an unbeliever, dismissing its medical possibilities as “talking moonshine.”1 Long after it was first proposed, NMR imaging of macro objects, specifically human bodies, remained a distant dream. Indeed, as Paul Lauterbur recalled, “MRI’s death certificate was signed several times” during this period.2 Apart from theoretical and technical difficulties, there were a variety of other issues and concerns that stood in the way of MRI’s emergence as a medical imaging technology. As this chapter will show, the birth of MRI was the outcome of a variety of unpredictable and contingent, albeit hierarchical, entanglements that stretched across both time and geography.3 Contrary to Everett Rogers’s widely influential “diffusion of innovation” thesis, the life cycle of MRI cannot be portrayed as an S curve.4 The issue here is not simply a matter of black boxing technical facets of technology development that diffusions models commonly do.5 Diffusion models such as Rogers’s hypostatize the history of technology: they present a caricatured and, in essence, linear understanding of invention and diffusion. 38 Chapter 2 My argument in this chapter is twofold. First, I argue that distinctions between invention, development, and diffusion of technology are, in practice , messy and muddled. Different stages in the life cycle of a technology are often folded onto each other. The development of MRI was definitely not linear. Despite promising contributions in the 1970s by Paul Lauterbur, Raymond Damadian, and Peter Mansfield, who are usually credited with the invention of MRI (see chapter 1), the birth of MRI occurred much later.6 Second, I argue that, even though it was contingent on circumstances and a result of bootstrapping and bricolage of different ideas, techniques, business interests, and health-care concerns, the development of MRI was also a hierarchical and exclusionary process.7 It occurred through innovative “boundary work” that was propelled by the regular flow of epistemic and technological objects and of scientists across disciplines, institutions, and nations.8 As it proceeded, new technoscientific trails emerged and some older trails got disconnected. It also resulted in MRI research becoming a big science, which, among other things, also had the consequence of privileging some research groups and excluding others.9 This chapter analyzes the hierarchical entanglements of this shift with respect to both industry’s involvement in and the transnational geography of MRI research.10 At one level, however, NMR research was already a “big science” well before the emergence of MRI (see chapter 4).11 The shift of NMR to biomedical imaging thus made the related MRI research an even bigger science. Contingency, Bricolage, and Emergence of a “Big Science” It is clearly thanks to Mother Nature’s good graces that NMR in human subjects is possible at all. If it took, instead of seconds, hours for spins to repolarize, the technique would be impractical. —Felix W. Wehrli, “The Origins and Future of NMR Imaging,” 1992 The initial proposals of Damadian, Lauterbur, and Mansfield definitely generated interest in an NMR imaging technology for biomedical purposes. Nevertheless, scientists soon realized that “Mother Nature’s good graces” did not take them very far.12 Although, as the section epigraph suggests, the few seconds it took for protons polarized by a magnetic field to return to a relaxed state offered hope, imaging the human body was a different matter altogether. Before proceeding further with the history of MRI development, let us briefly consider the different components of MRI (see figure 2.1). I must emphasize that these components were not known in advance: The [3.230.162.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:14 GMT) Translating a Dream into Reality 39 development of MRI, thus, was not...