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April 1, 2006

"Fantastic Voyage": Truth is Stranger
Last weekend saw the passing at 89 of film director Richard Fleischer. So why is a story about the man who made "Conan The Destroyer" and "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" in the Stent Blog? Not because he directed "Doctor Doolittle", but because he helmed the visionary film of 1966, "Fantastic Voyage", in which a team of physicians, armed with laser weapons, is shrunk and injected into a famous scientist's circulatory system. They travel to his brain where they zap! a blood clot that is threatening his life.

When I produced live case demonstration courses for cardiologists, I always used that clip to introduce a laser angioplasty case -- it was eerie to watch Edmund O'Brien and Raquel Welch laser-blasting a blood clot, and then (slow dissolve to 20 years later) watch Drs. Richard Myler and David Cumberland open up a blocked leg artery with a eerie green glowing laser catheter -- on live TV. Zap! Buzz!

I always wondered if the idea for "Fantastic Voyage" came from reality. The movie was made in 1966 and the trailer (which you MUST see) states it was two years in the making. So the film was conceived in 1964 -- the year in which Dr. Charles Dotter performed the very first angioplasty. He not only invented the concept and coined the term, but he made his own 16mm movie about it.

In August of 1964, Dotter appeared in LIFE Magazine (they went for the mad scientist angle) and the idea of treating arterial blockages from the inside out was publicized for the first time. Who's to say sci-fi author Jerome Bixby didn't read it and say, "Hey. My next screenplay!"

The U.S. medical community thought similarly that Dotter's concept was the stuff of science fiction and nixed it. But Dr. Eberhart Zeitler of Germany saw its genius and began teaching courses in Dotter's technique. And just about the time that he had gathered a "new wave" of physicians around him, "Fantastic Voyage" was released. Zeitler, in his own words to me:

"Oh, it was futuristic. It was futuristic! We all had the feeling that's the way we have to go. That's fantastic! It was at the time in which also an American movie exists in which a man was beamed small enough that you can inject him through a carotid artery. And this man, inside a body, looking inside of the body diagnostic!

"No question, further on we will have possibilities to look clear and now we have it -- now we have angioscopy, now we intravascular ultrasound. Still we are not beamed small to go inside directly -- but it was at this time. So this movie on one side and what we are doing...that's really crazy, no?"

Yes, in 1966 it was really crazy. And also, by the way, Dr. Andreas Gruentzig attended one of Dr. Zeitler's courses, thought the idea was not crazy, but interesting. He felt it needed a refinement: a balloon -- one which he invented and a few years later did the first coronary angioplasty. And today this crazy idea is the number one treatment for coronary artery disease.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

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