Ray Greek
Scientific disciplines normally thought of as outside the sphere of medical science have experienced advances over the past twenty years that currently have profound implications for medical care and medical research. Evolutionary and developmental biology, complexity and chaos science, along with the Human Genome Project and spinoff projects, have dramatically altered our understanding of how the human body functions and what can be expected from research methods like animal modeling. In this article, I summarize these advances and examine one historical medical development, the Blalock-Taussig shunt, in order to ascertain whether historically accepted representations of this development are consistent with current knowledge. I also examine an ongoing technology-intra-arterial stent development-to compare human data to the known animal data and place this comparison in the context of the aforementioned advances.