Contributors

Out of high school in the south of Germany, Thomas Münzel entered the medical field as a nurse. But a couple years later, after his father died of a heart attack at the age of 55, Münzel decided he wanted to become a doctor. He was 30 years old when he completed med school at Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg in 1985—too old, colleagues told him, to embark on a research career. But he got a stipend to spend two years at the University of Freiburg studying the regulation of coronary artery tone, and then another stipend to travel to David Harrison’s lab in the division of cardiology at Emory University in Atlanta. There, he studied nitrate tolerance and endothelial function, which became the focus of his research when he returned home to Germany a few years later. He became as assistant professor at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in ...