"Cytonics - a mystery of the living cell"

            Author : Dr. Rajah Vijay Kumar, D. Sc.

  Foreword from the book

By

Dr. Raymond V. Damadian

(Inventor of the MRI)

 
"While we live in a world of marvelous complexity and variety, what is invariant is that it is a world underwritten by absolute truth which invariant truth represents the bedrock upon which science rests.

Dr. Rajah Vijay Kumar has broken new ground. In his outstanding work on a unique subject, Cytonics, Vijay achieves a new plateau in our understanding of cellular function.

Thinking laterally and looking at a new concept or giving new explanations to the old is indeed a tough task. I had long ago written that our findings when working on the world's first MRI Scanner would have powerful applications in anti-cancer technology. I had discovered in 1971 ("Tumor Detection by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" Science, 171: 1151-1153, 1971) that cancer tissue had dramatic elevations in their NMR relaxation times that should enable their detection if a body sized MR scanner could be built. I knew at the time in accord with the writings of Dunham et al. and Brunschwig that malignant cells were marked by elevated cell potassium values and depressed Ca++ levels. I knew that changes in water content and water structure, which almost inevitably accompanied such changes in tissue alkali cation composition would be detectable by NMR. Vijay has taken this further and has tried to look deep into the cellular structures from an electronic perspective and explains how such pathological changes might be reversed by Magnetic Resonance, another outcome I hope for. Truly, Vijay's Rotational Field Quantum Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Technology is the flip side of my most beloved invention the MRI Scanner.

When I saw the world's first MR-Image, which I obtained with my colleagues, Mike Goldsmith and Larry Minkoff, at 4:45 am on July 3rd 1977, a cross-section at the Tg level of Larry Minkoff, my excitement skyrocketed. My dream had actually succeeded in taking its first step. 1 had succeeded in the construction of a real life NMR body scanner, despite the multitude of pejoratives and assertions of physical law violation that had been generated to disparage it. I had recommended in 1969 in my grant application to the Health Research Council of the City of New York, that "1 will make every effort myself and through collaborators, to establish that all tumors can be recognized by their potassium relaxation times or H20-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 stages of their genesis should bring us very close to the total eradication of this disease" (The Pioneers of NMR and Magnetic Resonance Imaging In Medicine: The Story of MRI by J. Mattson and M. Simon. Bar-Han U. Press, 1996, Chapter 8, A3). Vijay's pioneering work in Cytonics and the Electronics of the Living Cell and the "nanoblaster" bring to life new technologies for coupling the early MR detection of cancer tissue to efficient methods for eradicating them.

One cannot be but greatly impressed by Vijay's accomplishments as the author of Cytonics- a mystery of the living cell. This seminal work is a landmark contribution that will shape the development of Cytonics and related areas of Science, Technology and Medicine. "
 
-Dr. Raymond V. Damadian-