Today marks the 47th installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org titled Heroes of Progress. This bi-weekly column provides a short introduction to heroes who have made an extraordinary contribution to the well-being of humanity. You can find the 46th part of this series here.

This week our heroes are Raymond Damadian, Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield–three scientists who created and refined the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. Damadian created the world’s first MRI scanner after he realized that cancerous cells would produce different magnetic resonance signals when compared to normal, non-cancerous cells. Prompted by Damadian’s discoveries, Lauterbur developed a way for MRI machines to visualize these cells’ signal differences and produce a clear image of inside a patient’s body. Finally, Mansfield created a technique for MRI scans to be conducted in just seconds, rather than hours, and for the image that the scanners produced to be significantly clearer, and therefore more accurate. Each year, hundreds of millions of MRI scans take place. Thanks to their use, untold millions of lives have been extended or saved.

Raymond Damadian was born March 16, 1936 in New York to a family of Armenian immigrants. At just 10 years old, Damadian’s interest in detecting cancer was sparked after his maternal grandmother died of breast cancer. As a gifted violinist, Damadian won a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin at just 16 years old. While in Wisconsin, Damadian soon realized that his prospects of becoming a successful violinist were slim. Instead, he began to pursue his other passions – math’s and chemistry.

In 1956, Damadian graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in mathematics. With an aspiration to help find better treatments for cancer, Damadian studied medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. In 1960, Damadian graduated with an M.D. and enrolled in postgraduate fellowships at both Washington University and Harvard University. During his time at Harvard, Damadian became interested in the field of medical imaging and magnetic resonance. He had experienced severe abdominal pain and his doctors, who were using conventional x-rays, were unable to discover the cause of his ailment. This event led Damadian to ponder if there was a better way to examine the inner workings of the body.

As a medical student, Damadian had been automatically deferred from the draft to fight in the Vietnam War. However, in the mid-1960s, as the U.S. participation in the war neared its apex, Damadian received orders from the U.S. Air Force to begin active duty. Damadian was stationed at the Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. During his time in Texas, Damadian’s commanding officers allowed him to continue his personal work, which focused on using magnetic resonance, provided that he also did some investigations for the Air Force on the rocket fuel hydrazine. In 1967, Damadian left the military and joined the faculty of the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center to continue his work on magnetic resonance.

Magnetic resonance works by exposing atomic nuclei to a magnetic field and radio waves, which then cause the emission of other radio waves at consistent frequencies. When radio waves are pulsed through something that is being scanned, the protons in that object, or person, are stimulated and spin out of equilibrium. When the field is turned off, protons in the thing being scanned return to their normal spin and produce a radio signal, which can then be measured by receivers in the scanner. Damadian knew that cancerous cells held more water, and therefore more hydrogen, than healthy cells. In 1969, he theorized that when magnetic resonance equipment scans a body, radio waves will take longer to get through cancerous tissue. This lag could then be used to detect damaged tissue.

A year later, Damadian began testing his theory by scanning cancerous liver samples from laboratory rats using magnetic resonance. His experiments were successful. In 1971, he published his findings in the journal Science. In the article, he reasoned that cancerous tissues could be externally detected in humans without using radiation, providing a large enough scanner were built. This discovery laid the foundation for the basis of the MRI machines we have today. However, Damadian had no way of generating pictures or being able to clearly visualize the results of his scans. This is where Paul Lauterbur enters our story.

Paul Lauterbur was born May 6, 1929 in Ohio. As a child, Lauterbur was fascinated with science. When he was a teenager, he built his own laboratory in the basement of his parent’s house. After graduating from high school in 1947, Lauterbur enrolled at the Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) in Ohio to study chemistry. After graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1951, Lauterbur went to work as a research associate at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia. In 1953, Lauterbur was drafted into the Korean War and worked at the Army Chemical Center in Maryland.

As was the case with Damadian, Lauterbur’s superiors allowed him to work on an early magnetic resonance machine. By the time he left the army in 1955, he had published four scientific papers on magnetic resonance. After his two years in the military, Lauterbur returned to the Mellon Institute and enrolled in graduate classes at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1962, Lauterbur graduated from Pittsburgh with a PhD in Chemistry and accepted a position as an associate professor at Stony Brook University, New York.

In 1971, after reading Damadian’s article in Science, Lauterbur became interested in the potential biological uses of magnetic resonance technology. Lauterbur regretted that Damadian’s experiments had been done on dead tissue and began to wonder if there was a way for living tissue to be imaged. Lauterbur knew that Damadian used a uniform magnetic field. If a non-uniform field were used, he theorized, a clear image of the scan could be created. By adding gradients to the scanner’s magnet field, the MRI machine could determine the origin of the emitted radio waves from what was being scanned. As a consequence, an image could then be generated.

In 1973, Lauterbur was successful in producing the first ever magnetic resonance image of water in a test tube. After publishing his findings in the journal Nature, he soon imaged the first ever living subject: a small clam.

In 1974, Damadian received the first patent in the field of MRI, when his 1972 application for the concept of using magnetic resonance to detect cancer was approved. With the help of several graduate students, Damadian eventually built the first human MRI scanner, dubbed the “Indomitable.”  On July 3, 1977, almost five years after starting to test the machine, the Indomitable achieved the first human MRI scan of one of Damadian’s graduate students. The crude two-dimensional image showed the student’s heart and lungs.

On the other side of the Atlantic, another scientist, Peter Mansfield, began working on a method to significantly speed up the time it took for MRI machines to complete a scan. Mansfield was born on October 9, 1933 in London. Aged 15, Mansfield expressed an interest in science. Due to his unexceptional school performance, he was advised by his teacher to drop the subject. That led him to leave school and work as a printer’s assistant. Aged 19, Mansfield developing an interest in rocketry. He ignored his teacher’s advice and accepted a job with the Rocket Propulsion Department at the U.K. Ministry of Supply. Eighteen months later, Mansfield was called up for National Service.

After serving two years in the army, Mansfield returned to the Rocket Propulsion Department  in 1954. He also began to take night classes to gain a place at university. In 1956, Mansfield enrolled in a Bachelor of Science program in Physics at Queen Mary College, University of London. Mansfield graduated in 1959 and stayed at Queen Mary College to study for his PhD. There he worked in the magnetic resonance research group. In 1962, Mansfield graduated with a PhD in physics. In 1964, he became a lecturer at the University of Nottingham.

Mansfield followed Damadian’s and Lauterbur’s work closely, but considered the slow speed it took for the MRI machines to produce an image a significant problem. In 1977, Mansfield created a new technique that allowed MRI scans to take just seconds, rather than hours. His new method also produced clearer images.

After being unsuccessful in attracting any funding for his research, Damadian decided to set up his own company called the Fonar Corporation in 1978. Fonar aimed to produce and sell MRI machines, by adopting techniques developed by Lauterbur and Mansfield. In 1980, his company sold the first MRI machine. Soon Damadian’s machines were in hospitals and laboratories all over the world. In the 1980’s, Damadian also collaborated with our 36th Hero of Progress, Wilson Greatbatch, who invented the implantable pacemaker, to create an MRI-compatible pacemaker.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan awarded the National Medal of Technology to Damadian and Lauterbur for “their independent contributions in conceiving and developing the application of magnetic resonance technology to medical uses, including whole-body scanning and diagnostic imaging.” Less than one year later, Damadian was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 2007, Lauterbur was honored in the same way.

In 2003, controversy arose, when the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was presented to Lauterbur and Mansfield. Despite Nobel rules allowing awards to be shared by three people, Damadian was not given the prize. Some have suspected that Damadian’s creationist views, the fact he was a physician and not an academic scientist, or his supposedly abrasive personality, may have been factors that contributed to him not being awarded the prize. In response to Nobel’s announcement, Damadian took the unusual step of protesting the decision and took out several full-page advertisements in prominent newspapers all over the world to argue that he was deserving of the prize. Various MRI scientists have supported Damadian’s claim to the Nobel Prize, but many other scientists criticized his response to the decision, deeming it unprofessional.

Left to right: Raymond Damadian, Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield.

Throughout his life Lauterbur received dozens of awards and several honorary degrees. In 2007, he died, aged 77, from kidney disease at his home in Illinois. Mansfield also received a plethora of awards including a knighthood in 1993, and the Lifetime Achievement Award, which was presented to him by the U.K. Prime Minister in 2009. In 2017, Mansfield died, aged 83, in Nottingham, England. Today, Damadian remains chairman of the board of Fonar and still lives in New York.

Thanks to the work of Damadian, Lauterbur and Mansfield, the field of diagnostic medicine was changed forever. Without Damadian, it wouldn’t be known that serious diseases could be detected by magnetic resonance. Without Lauterbur, there wouldn’t be a way to clearly visualize the machine’s results. And without Mansfield, MRI machines would take hours, rather than seconds, to scan patients. The MRI scanners are among the most reliable diagnostic tools in all of medicine. Thanks to their existence, millions of lives have been extended and saved. For these reasons, Raymond Damadian, Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield are our deservingly our 47th Heroes of Progress.

No matter how well intentioned, sometimes hyper-precautionary rules can be deadly. By defaulting public policies to super-cautious mode and curtailing important innovations, laws and regulations can actually make the world less safe.

A new NBER working paper finds exactly this: the authors examined the “unintended effects from invoking the precautionary principle after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident,” which occurred in Japan in March 2011 due to a tsunami. They find that the Japanese government’s decision to entirely abandon nuclear energy following the incident resulted in many unnecessary deaths, primarily due to increased energy costs and corresponding cold weather-related welfare effects. Japan’s decision also has had potentially serious environmental implications.

The precautionary principle, in other words, can cost more lives than it saves.

How Excessive Regulation Costs Lives

The precautionary principle refers to the idea that public policies should limit innovations until their creators can prove they will not cause any potential harms or disruptions. Where there is uncertainty about future risks, the precautionary principle defaults to play-it-safe mode by disallowing trial-and-error progress, or at least making it far more difficult.

The problem with the precautionary principle is that uncertainty about the future and risks always exists. Worse yet, defaulting to super-safe mode results in a great deal of forgone experimentation with potentially new and better ways of doing things.

As I summarized in my last book, “living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios—and premising public policy on them—means that best-case scenarios will never come about. When public policy is shaped by precautionary principle reasoning,” I argued, “it poses a serious threat to technological progress, economic entrepreneurialism, social adaptation, and long-run prosperity.”

But can the precautionary principle really lead to deaths? Yes, it can. The aforementioned NBER paper by Matthew J. Neidell, Shinsuke Uchida, and Marcella Veronesi finds that, in the four-year period following the Fukushima accident, there were 1,280 cold-related deaths due to the government’s decision to completely end nuclear power production in Japan.

In the wake of that decision, Japanese citizens experienced immediate electricity price hikes as the country went from 30 percent nuclear power production to zero percent in just 14 months. Japan had to increase reliance on fossil fuels to offset that shortfall, which resulted in the rapid increase in electricity prices and corresponding increased fatalities from cold weather-related problems.

“This suggests that ceasing nuclear energy production has contributed to more deaths than the accident itself,” the authors find. In fact, the authors note, “[n]o deaths have yet to be directly attributable to radiation exposure, though projections estimate a cumulative 130 deaths.” But that total would still fall well short of the number of lives lost due to increased electricity prices overall.

Again, the study covers just four years, from 2011 to 2014. The authors say that fatalities due to higher electricity prices likely grew in the years beyond that because the effects of the nuclear ban continued to be felt—and those effects continue right up to present time.

The authors also note that there were likely significant health impacts associated with replacing nuclear power with fossil fuels due to the deterioration of local air quality, although they did not model those results in this study. Taken together, however, “the total welfare effects from ceasing nuclear production in Japan are likely to be even larger than what we estimate, and represents a fruitful line for future research,” they conclude.

The Golden Rice Case Study

This isn’t the only example of how the precautionary principle can undermine public health or lead to death. There are many others. A particularly powerful example involves Golden Rice, a form of rice that was genetically engineered to contain beta-carotene, which helps combat vitamin A deficiency.

Science writer Ed Regis recently published Golden Rice: The Imperiled Birth of a GMO Superfood, which provides a history of this super food. It serves as a cautionary tale of how the precautionary principle can cause unnecessary suffering and cost lives. Scientists in Germany developed the modified rice in the early 2000s to address the global vitamin A deficiency, which led to blindness and an estimated million deaths each year, primarily among children and pregnant women in undeveloped countries.

Unfortunately, anti-GMO resistance among environmental activists and regulatory officials held up the diffusion of this miracle food. Regis argues that one of the primary reasons it took 20 years to develop the final version of Golden Rice was “the retarding force of government regulations on GMO crop development.” He continues:

“Those regulations, which cover plant breeding, experimentation, and field trials, among other things, are so oppressively burdensome that they make compliance inordinately time-consuming and expensive. Such regulations exist because of irrational fears of GMOs, ignorance of the science involved, and overzealous adherence to the precautionary principle. Ingo Potrykus, one of the co-inventors of Golden Rice, has estimated that compliance with government regulations on GMOs caused a delay of up to ten years in the development of his final product. 

Ironically, in view of all the good that Golden Rice could have been doing in ameliorating vitamin A deficiency, blindness, and death during those ten years, it was precisely the government agencies that were supposed to protect people’s health that turned out to be the major impediments to faster development of this life-saving and sight-saving superfood. As it was, countless women and children died or went blind in those intervening years as a result of government-imposed regulatory delays. While that is not a ‘crime against humanity,’ it is nevertheless a modern tragedy.”

Regis points out that the real problem with the precautionary principle is that it treats innovations like Golden Rice as “guilty until proven innocent.” This is the essential danger associated with the precautionary principle that I documented in my last book and all my writing on this issue. Risk analysts and legal scholars have also criticized the precautionary principle because they argue it “lacks a firm logical foundation” and is “literally incoherent.” They argue the principle is, in essence, a non-principle because it fails to specify a clear standard by which to judge which risks are most serious and worthy of preemptive control.

But the precautionary principle really is rooted in a principle, or at least a preference. It is an implicit preference for stasis, or preservation of the status quo. Advocates of the precautionary principle might believe that doing nothing in the face of uncertainty seems like the safer choice. But to borrow a line from the rock band Rush, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice,” and by opting for stasis and disallowing ongoing innovation, precautionary principle advocates make a choice for us that leaves the world less safe in the long-run.

The late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky dedicated much of his life’s work to proving how efforts to create a risk-free society would instead lead to an extremely unsafe society. In his important 1988 book, Searching for Safety, Wildavsky warned of the dangers of “trial without error” reasoning, and contrasted it with the trial-and-error method of evaluating risk and seeking wise solutions to it. He argued that wisdom is born of experience and that we can learn how to be wealthier and healthier as individuals and a society only by first being willing to embrace uncertainty and even occasional failure:

“The direct implication of trial without error is obvious: If you can do nothing without knowing first how it will turn out, you cannot do anything at all. An indirect implication of trial without error is that if trying new things is made more costly, there will be fewer departures from past practice; this very lack of change may itself be dangerous in forgoing chances to reduce existing hazards. . . . Existing hazards will continue to cause harm if we fail to reduce them by taking advantage of the opportunity to benefit from repeated trials.”

This is the most crucial and most consistently overlooked lesson about the precautionary principle. When taken too far, precaution makes us less safe. It can even cause us suffering and lead to deaths. The burden of proof, therefore, is on advocates of the precautionary principle to explain why stopping experimentation is good for us, because it almost never is in practice.

“The Hidden Cost of Saying No”

More generally, the two case studies discussed above once again illustrate the simple truth that trade-offs exist and policy incentives matter. Regulation is not a magic wand that instantly grants society cost-free blessings. Every policy action has potential costs, many of which are hard to foresee upfront or even to estimate after the fact. The precautionary principle is static and short-sighted, focusing only on mitigating some direct, obvious risks. By stopping one potential risky outcome, policymakers can assure citizens that no potential danger can arise again because of that particular activity.

But sometimes the greatest risk of all is inaction. Progress and prosperity are impossible without constant trial-and-error experimentation and a certain amount risk-taking. Without risk, there can be no reward. In a new book, scientist Martin Rees refers to this truism about the precautionary principle as “the hidden cost of saying no.”

That hidden cost of precautionary regulations on Golden Rice resulted in “a modern tragedy” for the countless people who have suffered blindness or died as a result. That hidden cost was also quite profound for Japanese citizens following the Fukushima incident. If regulation forbids one type of energy production, something else must take its place to maintain living standards. The country’s decision to forbid nuclear power apparently lead to unnecessary deaths after other substitutes had to be used.

To be clear, the Fukushima incident was a horrible accident that had many other costs in its own right. Well over 100,000 residents were evacuated from the communities surrounding the plant due to contamination fears. But it remains unclear how much harm came about due to the release of radioactive materials relative to either the destructive power of the tsunami itself (or the resulting regulatory response).

The International Atomic Energy Agency maintains a site dedicated to ongoing Fukushima Daiichi status updates and notes that cleanup efforts are ongoing. Regarding sea area monitoring, the IAEA says that the “levels measured by Japan in the marine environment are low and relatively stable.” “The situation with regard to the safety of the food supply, fishery and agricultural production continues to remain stable,” as well.

There may also be long-term health care issues due to radiation exposure, even though that has not been proven thus far. Importantly, however, some lives were lost during evacuation of the area, especially among elderly individuals. Official reports from the Japanese government’s Reconstruction Agency found over 1,600 “indirect” deaths attributable to stress and other illnesses during the evacuation phase, which was more than those directly attributable to the disaster itself.

Risk Analysis is Complicated, But Essential

The dynamic nature of regulatory trade-offs such as these is what makes benefit-cost analysis so challenging yet essential. Policymakers must do a better job trying to model the costs of regulatory decisions—especially those involving sweeping precautionary controls—precisely because the costs of getting things wrong can be so profound.

A 2017 Mercatus Center working paper entitled, “Death by Regulation: How Regulations Can Increase Mortality Risk,” by James Broughel and W. Kip Viscusi found that “regulations costing more than $99.3 million per life saved can be expected to increase mortality risk. A cost-per-life-saved cutoff of approximately $100 million is a threshold cost-effectiveness level beyond which life-saving regulations will be counterproductive—where rules are likely to cause more expected fatalities than they prevent.” In other words, at some point regulation can become so costly that it actually does more harm than good. Where we find rules that impose costs beyond such a threshold, we should look for alternative solutions that will be more cost-effective and life-enriching.

In the aggregate, it is impossible to know how many lives are lost due to the application of the precautionary principle. There are just too many regulatory scenarios and dynamic effects to model. But when some critics decry efforts to estimate the potential costs associated with precautionary regulations, or insist that any cost is worth bearing, we must remind them that no matter how difficult it is to model risk trade-offs and uncertain futures, we must try to ensure that regulation is worth it. We live in a world of resource constraints and tough choices.

Indirect Opportunity Costs Matter Deeply

Generally speaking, however, it is almost never wise to completely foreclose important types of innovation that might offer society important benefits that are difficult to foresee. In the case of nuclear power, however, the benefits were quite evident from the start, but many countries opted to tightly control or stifle its development anyway.

Conversations about nuclear power in the United States were always tainted by worst-case thinking, especially following the Three Mile Island incident in 1979. Although that incident resulted in no deaths, it severely curtailed nuclear power as a major energy source in the US. Since that time, few new nuclear power plants have successfully been built and put online in the United States. That trend only worsened following the Fukushima accident, as regulatory requirements intensified. Political wrangling over nuclear waste disposal also holds up progress.

But the costs of those policy decisions are more evident today as we face questions about how to combat climate change and reduce carbon emissions. In a recent Wall Street Journal essay, Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvist argue that, “Only Nuclear Energy Can Save the Planet,” and offset fossil fuel consumption fast enough. Concerns about disasters and waste management persist even though, relatively speaking, nuclear power has had a fairly remarkable safety record.

Waste disposal concerns are also overstated. “An American’s entire lifetime of electricity use powered by nuclear energy would produce an amount of long-term waste that fits in a soda can,” they note. That is certainly a challenge we can handle relative to the massive carbon footprint all of us currently produce.

This case study about how the precautionary principle held back nuclear power innovation is instructive in a couple of ways. First, as suggested by the new NBER study and other research, the precautionary principle has had significantly negative direct costs in the form of increased electricity costs as well as increasing carbon emissions, due to forced continued reliance on fossil fuels.

Second, there have likely been many indirect costs in the form of forgone innovation. We simply do not know how much better nuclear power plants would be today if experimentation with new methods had been allowed over the past four decades. The dream of making power “too cheap to meter” via nuclear production might have become more than just a catchphrase or utopian dream. At a minimum, we would have likely had more Thorium-based reactors online that could have significantly improved efficiency and safety.

Conclusion

This points to the need for greater humility in policymaking. We do not possess crystal balls that will allow us to forecast the technological future, or all our future needs. Many countries (especially the United States) likely made a serious mistake by discouraging nuclear technologies, and now we and the rest of the world, are stuck living with the ramifications of that precautionary miscalculation. Likewise, the Golden Rice case study points to the dangers of regulatory hubris on the global stage, as policymakers in many held back life-saving innovations that could have alleviated suffering and death.

It is time to reject the simplistic logic of the precautionary principle and move toward a more rational, balanced approach to the governance of technologies. Our lives and well-being depend upon it.

This originally appeared in The Bridge. 

Today marks the 26th installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org titled Heroes of Progress. This bi-weekly column provides a short introduction to heroes who have made an extraordinary contribution to the well-being of humanity. You can find the 25th part of this series here.

This week, our hero is Wilhelm Röntgen. The German scientist was the first person to identify electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength that we today know as an “x-ray.” Today, x-ray machines are common at most medical facilities.  They are used for dozens of reasons, but the most common usage includes detection of broken and fractured bones, heart problems, breast cancer, scoliosis and tumours. The ability to accurately monitor the internal conditions of our bodies leads to better medical decisions. Every year, x-ray machines are used to help save the lives of millions of people.

Wilhelm Röntgen was born on March 26, 1845 in Lennep, Prussia. In 1862, Röntgen attended a boarding school in Utrecht. He was expelled in 1865, after he was accused of creating a caricature of one of his teachers. Without a high school diploma, Röntgen could only enroll at a university as a visitor, rather than an actual student. The Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich did not require a high school diploma and so, having passed the entrance exams, Röntgen enrolled as a student of mechanical engineering in Switzerland.

In 1869, Röntgen obtained a Ph.D. and became an assistant to Professor August Kundt, whom he followed first to the University of Würzburg and then to Strasbourg University. By 1874, Röntgen had qualified as a Lecturer at Strasbourg University. He became a professor in 1876. In 1879, Röntgen became the Chair of Physics at the University of Giessen. Röntgen moved once again in 1888, to become Chair of Physics at the University of Würzburg. It was during his time at Würzburg that Röntgen made his world-changing discovery.

On November 8, 1895, Röntgen was conducting experiments using a cathode ray tube – a specialised vacuum tube that gives off fluorescent light when an electrical charge passes through it. Röntgen noticed that when he used the cathode ray tube, a board on the other side of his lab that was covered in phosphorus began to glow. Intrigued, Röntgen covered the tube in a thick black cardboard box in order to cover the light that the tube emitted. Röntgen noticed that even after the tube’s light had been covered, the phosphorus board continued to glow. It soon became clear to Röntgen that he had discovered a new type of ray. Given the unknown nature of the ray, he named it “x-ray” (the mathematical “x” is often attributed to something unknown).

It is said that Röntgen spent the following weeks sleeping and eating in his laboratory as he investigated the properties of these new rays. After numerous experiments, Röntgen found that many materials were transparent or translucent when interposed in the path of the rays. These materials included paper, wood, aluminium and, most importantly for the medical industry, skin and flesh. Röntgen used a photographic plate to detail the transparency of different objects. Two weeks after his x-ray discovery, Röntgen took the first picture – a radiograph of his wife’s hand. When his wife saw the skeletal image, she exclaimed, “I have seen my own death!”

On December 28, 1895, Röntgen published a paper detailing his discovery titled “On a New Kind of Rays.” By January, Röntgen’s discovery was front-page news in Austrian newspapers. Over the next two years, news about x-rays spread and Röntgen published three papers about his experiments. Röntgen believed that his discovery should be publicly available and never sought a patent for x-rays. In 1900, at the special request of the Bavarian government, Röntgen moved to the University of Munich to be the chair of their physics department.

Röntgen was showered with numerous prizes, medals and honorary doctorates. In 1901, he was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics. After receiving the money given to Nobel Prize-winners, Röntgen donated all of it to research at the University of Würzburg. On February 10, 1923, Röntgen died from carcinoma of the intestine. He was 77 years old. In 2004, the chemical element number 111 was named “roentgenium” in his honor.

Röntgen’s discovery of the x-ray fundamentally changed medical practices forever. Every day, his work is being used to help save lives of people across the world. It is for that reason that Röntgen is our 26th Hero of Progress.