It has been known for more than three centuries that chronic stable angina pectoris is most commonly caused by narrowing of one or more epicardial arteries. Andreas Grüntzig’s brilliant development of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) in 1977 to relieve coronary obstruction was the first and most important step in the development of modern percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), and represents one of the triumphs of twentieth-century medicine. Coronary revascularization by PTCA soon became a widely used and effective approach for the treatment of angina. When compared with coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG), PCI proved to be equally efficacious in the majority of patients. To the chagrin of cardiac surgeons, an increasing fraction of patients with disabling chronic stable angina selected PCI over surgery because it causes little discomfort and requires only a brief hospitalization and convalescence. Furthermore, it does not exclude subsequent surgery, should it be necessary...