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(Circulation Research. 2000;87:6.)
© 2000 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorials

The Real Thing

Michael R. Rosen

From the Departments of Pharmacology and Pediatrics, Center for Molecular Therapeutics, College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University, New York, NY.

Correspondence to Michael R. Rosen, MD, College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University, Department of Pharmacology, 630 W 168 St, PH7W-321, New York, NY 10032. E-mail mrr1@columbia.edu

Key Words: electrocardiography • genetic translation • molecular biology • arrhythmia

	Introduction

 
Fifteen minutes into Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, the audience realizes it is seeing a play within a play, the reality of which will be expressed in a dimension yet to unfold. Dramatic license? Of course; and yet it is not far from what we experience in science. Whether because of or despite the fact that the molecular age is upon us, at times we succumb to the temptation to read universal reality (rather than the play within a play imposed by our experimental design) into our results. And there is nothing wrong with this if exercising our imaginations identifies the next set of questions that will reject or substantiate our hypotheses and bring us closer to the truth.

Translational Research (formerly Physiology) provides a potent vehicle for associating experimental reality with The Real Thing. Yet all the models we use, whether computers, cells, tissues, or animals, can spew forth data that muddy the distinction between what is real and unreal. One example this statement applies to is mouse physiology. Since the advent of transgenic technology, we have learned a great deal about the mouse, all of it relevant to the mouse, and some of it relevant to other forms of animal life. But what is relevant, where is it relevant, and when?

The study by Guo et al¹ in this issue of Circulation Research is a case in point. The authors integrate molecular determinism, cellular manifestation, and in vivo expression. The result is an interesting counterpoint, incorporating . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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