paper were too fuzzy, although they were the first images to show the difference between heavy water and ordinary water. Lauterbur said of the initial rejection: "You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature." Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom took Lauterbur's initial work another step further, replacing the slow (and prone to artefacts) projection-reconstruction method used by Lautebur's original technique with a method that used frequency and phase encoding by spatial gradients of magnetic field. Owing to Larmor precession, a mathematical technique called a Fourier transformation could then be used to recover the desired image, greatly speeding up the imaging process. Lauterbur unsuccessfully attempted to file patents related to his work to commercialize the discovery. The State University of New York chose not to pursue patents, with the rationale that the expense would not pay off in the end. "The company that was in charge of such applications decided that it would not repay the expense of getting a patent. That turned out not to be a spectacularly good decision," Lauterbur said in 2003. He attempted to get the federal government to pay for an early prototype of the MRI machine for years in the 1970s, and the process took a decade. The University of Nottingham did file patents which later made Mansfield wealthy. Nobel Prize Lauterbur was awarded the Nobel Prize along with Mansfield in the fall of 2003. Controversy occurred when Raymond Damadian took out full-page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times headlined "The Shameful Wrong That Must Be Righted" saying that the Nobel committee had not included him as a Prize winner alongside Lauterbur and Mansfield for his early work on the MRI. Damadian claimed that he discovered MRI and the two Nobel-winning scientists refined his technology. The New York Times published an editorial saying that while scientists credit Damadian for holding an early patent in MRI technology, Lauterbur and Mansfield expanded upon Herman Carr's technique in order to produce first 2D and then 3D MR images. The editorial deems this to be worthy of a Nobel prize even though it states clearly in Alfred Nobel's will that prizes are not to be given out solely on the basis of improving an existing technology for commercial use. The newspaper