Relaxing and Contracting Factors

It is an exciting task to be the editor of the first monograph covering a new area of the biomedical sciences. Since the first report in 1980 by Robert Furchgott and colleagues (see Chapter 1) of the evidence of endothelium-dependent relaxation in isolated arteries, there are ever­ increasing numbers of vascular physiologists and pharmacologists who are scraping away the endothelium to look into i...