In the next 12 months, at least 21,000 people in Britain will die from heart failure, a condition which is both easy to identify and cheap to treat.

The Observer, March 2005

What is it about the heart and pop songs? Owner of a lonely heart. Everybody's got a hungry heart. Looking for the heart of Saturday night. The seminal Half Man Half Biscuit song 'I Left My Heart in Papworth General'. No one sings that way about the kidneys or the pancreas.
A few weeks ago at a lunchtime meeting in the elegant minimalist conference room at the Hempel hotel in west London, someone's mobile phone played the opening bars of 'My Heart Will Go On'. Among cardiologists and others in the heart business this may once have passed for a thigh-slapping joke, but on this particular Wednesday anyone within earshot turned away in horror. The many heart experts in the room - consultant professors, executives from the British Heart Foundation, specialist nurses, representatives from the health and medical journals - had gathered to discuss the results of a large survey about heart failure, and the atmosphere was friendly but serious. No one was in the mood for funny ringtones.
The heart people had come together at a time of great excitement in their world. There wasn't very much they couldn't do to repair the most complex of problems. Transplants were routine. Quadruple heart-bypass surgery would have you back on the golf course within a month. Wonder drugs to control the heart rate and thickness of the blood saved countless lives every year. Pacemakers were already stale news compared to the tiny, implantable defibrillators that administered electric shocks and restored a normal heartbeat. Each week all over the country, people dressed as Big Bird ran round parks to raise millions to extend yet further the boundaries of cardiovascular research, in the well-founded belief that what can't be fixed now will be fixed in the future: there was already the prospect of stem-cell breakthroughs enabling muscle patches to be placed on a damaged heart with the ease with which we now place plasters on a knee.
But those gathered at the Hempel hotel had one problem that still caused palpitations. Why, if we know so much about the heart, do we know so little about heart failure? And why are we pursuing the glories of biotechnology while simultaneously witnessing the premature deaths of thousands of people each year from what appears to be nothing more than unwitting ignorance?

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