The first PTCAs in Zurich, in 1977

The early days of discovery remembered by one who was there, Marko Turina, the only ever cardiac surgeon as Dean of the Medical Faculty, University of Zürich, Switzerland, discusses the events of 1977, when he prepared the operating room for an emergency coronary artery bypass graft which was never needed The date of the first successful percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), as it was then known, by Andreas Grüntzig in the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland is well known: 16 September 1977. The procedure, now known as percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), was not a stroke of luck, it was the work of a genius. Highly effective dilatation of a proximal left anterior descending (LAD) coronary artery stenosis (Figure 1), which provided lasting benefit to the patient, was the result of a long, tedious experimental development, with repeated redesigns and improvements of the dilatation catheter itself, and a systematic experimental approach to the project of percutaneous coronary dilatation.