Fonar Corp. v. General Electric Co.
"Fonar" was a dispute between medical device manufacturer Fonar Corporation and General Electric over Fonar's patent on MRI technology. Fonar's founder, Raymond Damadian, was issued U.S. Patent 3,789,832 (priority date 1972-03-17) for an "apparatus and method for detecting cancer in tissue" using the magnetic resonance of atoms. Damadian's patent was the first patent on an MRI machine issued in the United States. Also at issue was a later patent, U.S. Patent 4,871,966 issued in 1989, covering a method for obtaining MRI images of multiple planes at different orientations in a single scan. GE is a major manufacturer of MRI scanners, and Fonar sued GE for infringing these patents by producing its scanners as well as inducing others to infringe.
Howard Cary
Henry Cary (3 May 1908 – 20 December 1991) was an American engineer and the co-founder of the Applied Physics Corporation (later known as Cary Instruments), along with George W. Downs and William Miller. The Cary 14 UV-Vis-NIR and the Cary Model 81 Raman Spectrophotometer were particularly important contributions in scientific instrumentation and spectroscopy. Before starting Applied Physics, Cary was employed by Beckman Instruments, where he worked on the design of several instruments including the ubiquitous DU spectrophotometer. Howard Cary was a founder and the first president of the Optical Society of Southern California.