Curiosity, discipline, and joy; and the greatest of these is joy.

THE house lights go down, you settle in your seat, and the theater quiets to murmurs of anticipation. The stage lights go up, and, after brief introductions, out walk three men who have shaped our specialty and who continue to shape it. Their names—Severinghaus, Miller, and Shafer—are familiar to most of us as inventors, textbook writers, and researchers, but we are probably a little vague on the specifics. Then they begin telling us their stories, and, for a while, we understand their ideas and how they apply to each of us and to our specialty. For the first time, ANESTHESIOLOGY presents to you articles based on the three primary lectures of the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists: the Emery A. Rovenstine Lecture, the John W. Severinghaus Lecture on Translational Science, and the Honorary Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research (FAER) Research Lecture. You can view the two former lectures at http://2008highlightscme.asahq.org. Unfortunately, the Honorary FAER Research Lecture was not recorded in 2008. Although these articles lack the drama of the lectures themselves, they clearly capture the ideas and the story lines behind the drama. If you were not able to attend these wonderful lectures, and even if you were, I encourage you to spend a few minutes reading these articles. These men describe who we are as professionals and the tremendous gifts our specialty has brought to medicine and to society. My goal in this editorial is to provide a brief synthesis of these ideas, in part to help frame the importance of their central messages, but mostly to peak your interest to read them. On the surface, these men’s life stories are quite different, as are their approaches to their lectures. All three men are anesthesiologists. John Severinghaus is a physicist who because a physiologist, and talks about building better gadgets. Ron Miller, the most recognized anesthesiologist on the planet, is a research scientist, but also an administrator and politician (in the best sense of the word) who talks about processes and policies. Steve Shafer is a pharmacologist and computer programmer who talks about evidence and probabilities. Of course, their accomplishments encompass more than these simple nouns, but they clearly are very different people with very different skills. Yet the fascinating thing about their lectures and articles is the similarity of their central themes and conclusions. This similarity is no more obvious than in their opening statements, which could be interchanged among articles surprisingly well. Ron Miller’s opening regarding “John Snow’s remarkable curiosity and ‘fire of investigation’ . . . [which] went beyond the boundaries of anesthesiology in the pursuit of excellence,” could easily have been that of John Severinghaus, whose opening that “translational science has steadily improved the specialty of anesthesiology” could belong to Steve Shafer. And what better way for Ron Miller to have begun than with Steve Shafer’s quote that “you must keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out!” I believe that the personal journey described by each of these authors exemplifies and guides the journey of our specialty to survive and to grow. Three central themes—curiosity, discipline, and joy—emerge in these stories and interweave to produce remarkably similar conclusions.