25th anniversary of the foundation of the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery.

It was on May 17th 1986 in one of the lounges of RoissyCharles de Gaulle airport in Paris that a group of 12 cardiac and thoracic surgeons decided to found the EACTS after two prior meetings on March 1st 1986 at Amsterdam airport and on April 12th 1986 at Frankfurt airport, during which the advisability of creating such an association was debated (Fig. 1). Three or four of us already were convinced that, despite the existence of excellent national societies, the field of cardio-thoracic surgery in Europe was not sufficiently represented and that it was something of an aberration if the best European scientific studies needed to be presented outside Europe to be recognized by the international scientific community at conferences to which many of us did not have access for reasons of geographical distance or financial constraints, young surgeons in particular. We had been in contact with other European colleagues, highly reputed in their respective countries and throughout Europe, who had accepted to join us to examine the project. Some of us were meeting each other for the first time but quickly, right from the outset in Amsterdam, we understood that we all thought the project interesting and that we needed to go forward. There were 12 of us initially, rapidly enthusiastic, confident in the future and with a strong conviction that we would succeed because the need for such an Association existed in Europe, with its hundreds of high level cardiothoracic surgery departments with regard to scientific qualities and intellectual creativity. We agreed on the fact that a fair proportion of cardiac and thoracic surgeons needed to be present in the Council. We decided that the Council would consist of 11 members, 5 officers and 6 councillors: President: Francis Fontan, VicePresident: Keyvan Moghissi, Secretary General: Marko Turina, Editor: Hans Borst, Treasurer: Ingolf Vogt-Moykopf, Councillors: Maurizio Cotrufo, Louis Couraud, Hans Huysmans, Ramiro Rivera, Bjarne Semb and David Wheatley, most of them became Presidents in the following years. The Constitution and the By-Laws of the Association were drawn up mainly by one of us in particular (Keyvan Moghissi) and were largely based on those of the AATS. A fundamental aspect of our project was the founding of the Association’s scientific journal essential for the publica-