I would like to thank you for the honour of electing me as your President. As many of you might suspect and some of you know, in a well organised society like ours, with the Secretariat ably run by Torkel Aberg and Maud Zingmark, and the Organisational Secretariat efficiently managed by Kathy McGree, the duties of the President are not onerous. But still, a major task rests heavily on the shoulders of every President – the task of delivering the presidential address. After looking through the efforts of my predecessors, I decided on the topic, which captivated me for many years, but has received little attention in the past. I will talk about our society, the European Association for Cardio-thoracic Surgery (EACTS), which I had the honour to serve as Secretary, Editor, and now as President. I will try to give you my personal view of the origins of this association; I will share with you some observations why this association was started; how it developed and where it stands now; and I will offer some thoughts about actions, which we should take in the future. The EACTS traces its origin to a group of skiing cardiac surgeons, who enjoyed lively scientific exchange and sports, first in the shadows of Matterhorn in Cervinia, and continued to meet for a number of years on the slopes of Courchevel in France. The person who really started this association, to whom the association owns its existence, and who must be given full credit for its success, is Francis Fontan (Fig. 1). He has not only realised the necessity for an advanced European scientific forum for cardio-thoracic surgery, but also had the intellectual authority and tenacity to start this association. In 1986 he invited a small group of European cardio-thoracic surgeons to a meeting to be held at the airport in Amsterdam. He made a careful preparation of the topics to be discussed, centred on the formation of a new scientific organisation of cardio-thoracic surgery. As a thoracic counterpart in the formative years of the EACTS, the honour goes to Keyvan Moghissi (Fig. 2), who helped write most of the original constitution, and who carefully preserved the balance between cardiac and thoracic surgery in the offices and governing bodies of the Association. First congress was organised in Vienna in 1987 by Ernst Wolner and was opened by the first president of the Association, Francis Fontan, on September 14th, 1987. The first meeting of the EACTS was an unequivocal success, and led in 1988 to the second meeting in Bordeaux, and continued with a series of annual meetings leading to this 16th congress in 2002. Why did we decide to start another cardio-thoracic association? First, many of us were frustrated and unhappy with the state of surgical meetings in Europe. In those earlier conferences, there was often an obvious geographical bias in the selection of papers, with several countries having to be represented in the program, without consideration for the scientific quality of the material. Anonymous selection of papers was not applied, many speakers announced in the program did not bother to appear, and papers were rarely published. Even worse, those meetings often addressed only a narrow choice of topics, with soporific consequence of sessions consisting of 6, 7 or 8 almost identical papers about the same subject. Meetings did not keep to the announced schedule, afternoon sessions were sometimes delayed for hours due to substantial lunch breaks. In summary, it was a far cry from truly professional meetings of the American Association of Thoracic Surgery (AATS) and Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS), where European surgeons went to present their best material, and to learn about advances in our profession. But the founders of the EACTS were also aware of the important tradition of the European cardio-thoracic surgery, and we felt that it deserved a proper scientific forum. First documented suture of the heart was performed by Ludwig Rehn in Frankfurt in 1896 (Fig. 3). Application of pneumothorax for treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis – the European Journal of Cardio-thoracic Surgery 22 (2002) 857–863