Many will remember the segment of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" in the Disney film Fantasia; it is a perfect metaphor for medical imaging as it stands today. The apprentice magician tests his nascent skills at sorcery by bringing common household items to life and putting them to work. At first, things go well, but eventually he loses control, and chaos ensues.

Medical imaging, too, could spin out of control. The benefits of imaging are undeniable. In the past thirty years, innovations like CT, MRI, and PET scanning have not only markedly reduced clinical risk for patients but have...

By the end of World War I, Albert Einstein had become the face of the new science of theoretical physics and had made some powerful enemies. One of those enemies, Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard, spent a career trying to discredit him. Their story of conflict, pitting Germany's most widely celebrated Jew against the Nazi scientist who was to become Hitler's chief advisor on physics, had an impact far exceeding what the scientific community felt at the time. Indeed, their mutual antagonism affected the direction of science long after 1933, when Einstein took flight to America and changed the...