Morton A. Meyers, M.D. is Distinguished University Professor of Radiology and Internal Medicine and emeritus Chair of the Department of Radiology at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. His classic Dynamic Radiology of the Abdomen: Normal and Pathologic Anatomy (Springer), soon to appear in its Sixth Edition, has been hailed as “the book that revolutionized abdominal radiology”. It has undergone translations into Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Portuguese. He has edited a series of volumes dealing with iatrogenic diseases and a major textbook with fifty-five international contributors on staging of abdominal cancer. He founded Abdominal Imaging, a prestigious international journal, thirty-three years ago and continues as its Editor-in-Chief. He has contributed over 200 articles to the scientific literature. Dr. Meyers has served as Visiting Professor by invitation at over 70 medical schools in the United States, and has presented invited lectures in Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Greece, Israel, Egypt, South Africa, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Canada and Mexico. He has been awarded the Gold Medal by a number of national and international societies, as well as the Walter B. Cannon Medal.
He has always been interested, he says, “not only in the ‘what’ but particularly the ‘how’. How something came about, the lessons learned. Much of a scientific or medical education is not designed to foster creativity: rather it consists of accumulating facts without any recognition of how those facts were obtained. Understanding comes from making connections between many disparate facts. Information is not knowledge. A personal eureka moment in medicine led me to pursue the underlying factor in many modern medical advances. It's particularly important for the interested citizen to understand the role of chance in medical discoveries for the wise allocation of national resources."
He is currently working on conflicts over priority and credit in Nobel Prize awards in the fields of science and medicine.
Dr. Meyers lives in East Setauket, New York.
