Cardiovascular biology, in recent years, has become a transdisciplinary subject which receives inputs from many fields of life sciences. The number of research teams involved in cardiovascular research is currently increasing all over the world, as suggested by some indicators. For example, in the last six years, there has been a steady increase in the number of abstracts submitted to the congresses of the European Society of Cardiology. Four thousand and five abstracts were submitted to the Congress of Vienna in 1988,5,293 for Stockholm in 1990, 6,962 for Barcelona in 1992, and 7,791 abstracts were received by the organizers of the Joint XIIth World Congress of Cardiology and XVIth Congress of the European Society of Cardiology, held at Berlin in September, 1994. This Congress was among the largest scientific meetings ever held in the world.
Another estimate of the contemporary importance of the cardiovascular research is represented by the number of specialized journals and the amount of papers published every year. In 1991, 70 journals were ranked in the Science Citation Index under the topic "Cardiovascular System." On the other hand, about 500-600 papers related to cardiovascular research were included every week in the Current Contents-on-Diskette8 (Life Sciences) during 1994, that is, about 25,000-