What is it about?
Spencer B. King III is a former president of the American College of Cardiology and has seen the development of angioplasty from its early days in the 1980s. In a long and distinguished career he is well placed to look back on some of the milestones in interventional cardiology and to suggest what we can expect to see in the future.
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Why is it important?
King describes meeting Andreas Grüntzig, the German physician–scientist, as a pivotal point in his career and in 1980 when Grüntzig was looking for a fresh start away from Zurich, King was instrumental in bringing him to his lab at Emory. Although Grüntzig's career was cut short, his ideas and concepts lived on and King describes some of the implications of his work.
Perspectives
Andreas Grüntzig is frequently portrayed as a European cardiologist but it's worth considering that he had to leave Europe to realise his ideas and concepts. Following his premature death, we will never know what Grüntzig might have gone on to achieve, but it's unlikely he would have got so far without US support.
Judith Ozkan
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Spencer B. King III MD FACC, European Heart Journal, September 2017, Oxford University Press (OUP),
DOI: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehx443.
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