Dr. Werner Forssmann was young (25) and eager to prove the worth of a revolutionary idea: that it should be possible to learn more about the inside of a diseased human heart by inserting a thin rubber tube (catheter) into it. But none of his hospital colleagues in Eberswalde, near Berlin, was willing to be a guinea pig. Suspecting the gleam in young Forssmann's eyes, the chief surgeon even forbade his experimenting on himself. Secretly one night Dr. Forssmann punctured a vein in his arm and persuaded a fellow resident to start working a tube into it. With little more than...
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