In 1977 Andreas Grüntzig brought angioplasty into the coronary arteries and, in the strict sense, founded modern interventional cardiology. His balloon catheter — handmade — allowed dilation of a coronary stenosis in an awake patient without opening the chest. The patient was still alive and asymptomatic when Grüntzig presented the case at the American Heart Association Meetings that same year. He died in 1985 at age 46. The technique he developed in his Zurich kitchen has since been performed on tens of millions of patients worldwide.