Heart surgery is still a relatively recent advance in medical technology. The first open-heart procedure was closure of an atrial septal defect in a child at the University of Minnesota Hospital in 1953. This issued in a life-saving advance, the use of which has expanded enormously to in clude treatment of many areas of cardiac disease. Not unexpectedly, surgical techniques allowed through the use of the heart-lung machine (open-heart surgery) came to be applied in 1967 to the major killer of Americans, namely, coronary artery disease. This operation, known as coronary artery bypass, has...