The birth, early years, and future of interventional radiology.

THE Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. During these 30 years, SIR has grown from a closed club with fewer than 100 members to an open society with 4,000 members. The history of the Society and its exciting growth is detailed on the SIR web site, www.sirweb.org. This issue of JVIR also contains commemorative articles of some founding members on the formative years of SIR, its transition to an open society, perspectives for its future, and the history of nonvascular interventions. However, only a few SIR members remember the birth and early years of interventional radiology. It is our intention to bring these days back to you by recounting how interventional radiology was born and how it grew, particularly in the area of vascular interventions. This article is a remembrance, a collection of the highlights of our memories of events that happened 25–40 years ago, documented by historic pictures. Fortunately, the human memory has the most generous and merciful nature; it encrypts in the mind exciting and memorable events while repressing unemotional or disturbing occasions or at least permitting us to look at them differently. Many of the momentous events associated with the birth and early years of interventional radiology are still as fresh in our memory as if they occurred yesterday. But, because the human memory is also quite subjective, our memories could be somewhat biased as we take you back into the exciting early years of interventional radiology.