Raymond Damadian

In the late 1960s Raymond Damadian discovered that malignant tissue had different NMR parameters than normal tissue. He mused that, based on these differences, it should be possible to do tissue characterization. Based on this discovery he produced the first ever NMR image of a rat tumor in 1974. In 1977 Damadian and his team constructed the first super conducting NMR scanner (known as The Indomitable) and produced the first image of the human body, which took almost 5 hours to scan