Raymond Damadian
Damadian has received several prizes. In 2001, the Lemelson-MIT Prize Program bestowed its $100,000 Lifetime Achievement Award on Damadian as "the man who invented the MRI scanner." He went on to collaborate with Wilson Greatbach, one early developer of the implantable pacemaker, to develop an MRI-compatible pacemaker. The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia gave its recognition of Damadian's work on MRI with the Bower Award in Business Leadership. He was also named Knights of Vartan 2003 "Man of the Year". He received a National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989.
Magnetorotational instability
The MRI was first noticed in a non-astrophysical context by Evgeny Velikhov in 1959 when considering the stability of Couette flow of an ideal hydromagnetic fluid. His result was later generalized by S. Chandrasekhar in 1960. This mechanism was proposed by Acheson & Hide (1973) to perhaps play a role in the context of the Earth's geodynamo problem. Although there was some follow-up work in later decades (Fricke, 1969; Acheson and Hide 1972; Acheson and Gibbons 1978), the generality and power of the instability were not fully appreciated until 1991, when Balbus & Hawley gave a relatively simple elucidation and physical explanation of this important process.