The postgraduate course started with an enlightening Paul Lichtlen Lecture, commemorating the founder of this educational event and long-time chairman of cardiology at Hannover Medical University. This year’s awardee was Hugo Katus, professor and chairman of cardiology at Heidelberg University in Germany (
fig. 1). The story of troponin is the story of Hugo Katus’ professional life and a paradigm of clinical research, starting from the bench with a protein considered of potential importance in cardiac disease to the development of a diagnostic assay that is today used in almost all cardiac centres around the world in patients presenting with chest pain. In the late 1970s, the awardee worked in Edgar Haber’s Cardiac Unit at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, USA. He devoted his work to a hitherto rarely investigated myocardial protein and went on to demonstrate its role in a variety of cardiac disorders. He went on to provide an assay in close collaboration with the medical industry, and eventually convinced the cardiology community of its diagnostic value in the emergency department for patients presenting with chest pain – an almost perfect journey in science!