the scientific community of Lauterbur's proposed idea of using NMR in vivo (still in the human body, an imaging device). However, in 1969, Damadian had previously proposed NMR as a method for external scanning of internal cancers in the body, i.e. in vivo: I am very much interested in the potential of NMR spectroscopy for early non-destructive detection of internal malignancies. … I will make every effort myself, and through collaborators, to establish that all tumors can be recognized by their potassium relaxation times or H2O-proton spectra and proceed with the development of instrumentation and probes that can be used to scan the human body externally for early signs of malignancy. Detection of internal tumors during the earliest states of their genesis should bring us very close to the total eradication of the disease. Though it would later turn out to be irreproducible, in his 1971 Science paper, Damadian showed different NMR signals for tumors and different tissue types: In principle, nuclear magnetic resonance [NMR] techniques combine many of the desirable features of an external probe for the detection of internal cancer. This was clearly influential, as Lauterbur wrote in 1986: … the attention of the medical community was first attracted by the report of Damadian that some animal tumors have remarkably long water proton relaxation times. … even long normal tissues differed markedly among themselves in NMR relaxation times, and I wondered whether there might be some way to noninvasively map out such quantities within the body. Thus it was the discovery of strongly variant relaxation times that led to Lauterbur's quest to represent these relaxation time differences graphically. Without these differences, unknown until Damadian's work, there would be nothing to make an image with. Hence a book on MRI history, which included chapters on both Damadian and Lauterbur, Chapter 8 entitled, "Raymond V. Damadian: Originator of the Concept of Whole-Body NMR Scanning (MRI) and Discoverer of the NMR Tissue Relaxation Differences That Made It Possible." The book pointed out the importance of both men: Because of the contributions of Dr. Raymond Damadian and Dr. Paul Lauterbur, magnetic resonance imaging has become the most powerful and reliable diagnostic tool in medicine. … Millions of people the world over enjoy a higher quality of life and many lives have been saved, thanks to the contributions of Damadian and Lauterbur. NMR scanning resulted from two essential steps. They were taken by