Dr Carolyn Lam:                Welcome to Circulation on The Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and its editors. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, associate editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. This week's issue is so special. It is an autopsy issue. I think it's actually the first of its kind in the history of Circulation. I am so pleased to have with me today Dr Jeffrey Saffitz from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who's the content editor for Pathology for Circulation and the guest editor for this entire autopsy issue. Welcome, Jeff. Dr Jeffrey Saffitz:             Thank you. Dr Carolyn Lam:                We also have Dr Lee Goldman from Columbia University Medical Center who wrote a beautiful perspective piece on autopsy. Thank you and welcome, Lee. Dr Lee Goldman:              Morning. Dr Carolyn Lam:                Jeff, could you start us off? I mean, an autopsy issue. How in the world did this come about? Dr Jeffrey Saffitz:             I think it really began by coincidence. The journal received submissions from several authors, each involving studies of autopsies, and the editors approached me and asked if we might consider grouping them together in a special issue focused on the role of the autopsy and cardiovascular medicine. I thought that would be a very interesting idea and this evolved into actually something much greater. Two additional papers came in focusing on the autopsy and I think looking at these papers in the aggregate, they represent what we can now consider to be the contemporary utility of the autopsy in understanding the way cardiovascular disease works. So I was particularly pleased that the editors agreed to group these papers into a single issue focused on the autopsy. We were really delighted that Lee Goldman agreed to write a perspective. He has had a longstanding history of studying the role of the autopsy and I hope the readers will find this to be a really interesting and useful issue which will, I hope, chart the course for future discovery. Dr Carolyn Lam:                Just listening to you, I love the way you say it's a contemporary look at autopsy. I mean, we covered things like molecular genetic, proteomic, autopsies, even like electronic autopsies using device. That's really cool. Lee, thank you again for sharing your time and incredible perspectives with us. The long history of autopsy. Do you think it's still necessary now? Dr Lee Goldman:              Maybe give some perspective. I first got involved in this a number of decades ago, when as a junior faculty member, I was assigned to be on the medical audit committee of the hospital where I saw patients as a cardiologist. And two of the senior people in the committee got into a debate about whether autopsies were still important given the advent of CT scans and other modern diagnostic technology. And to listen to them debate for 15 or 20 minutes, I finally had the temerity to pipe in and say we can actually study this, and so we did. We looked at autopsies in three different decades: 1960, 1970, 1980, and much to everyone's surprise, I think found, A. that the rate of which autopsies found diagnoses that doctors had missed and for which treatment would almost certainly have prolonged life was about 10 percent, and it was 10 percent, 1960, 10 percent, 1970, 10 percent, 1980.                                                 But the difference was that doctors were missing different diagnoses. The things that got missed in 1960, and where autopsies showed there were being missed led to better diagnostic approaches and those things were rarely missed in 1980. But since people stayed alive longer, they got new things that we didn't really know much about in 1960. A big difference, fewer people missed heart attacks, pulmonary emboli, and things of that sort, but far more people had missed infections, especially fungal infections that were complication of multiple antibi