Dr Spencer B. King III

Pioneer profile in the World Elite Doctors hall of pioneers. This entry is commemorative and is not a listing for consultation or referral.

Angioplasty’s move to America

Spencer B. King III became the first director of the cardiac catheterisation laboratory at Emory University Hospital in 1972, and in 1980 recruited Andreas Gruentzig from Zurich to build an interventional programme in Atlanta. That decision brought coronary angioplasty to the United States as an organised discipline rather than an isolated technique, and made Emory the place where a generation of operators learned it.

Putting the technique on trial

King led the first NHLBI-sponsored randomised comparison of coronary angioplasty against bypass surgery — the Emory Angioplasty versus Surgery Trial. At a time when enthusiasm for the new procedure ran well ahead of evidence, subjecting it to a randomised comparison against the established operation was an act of scientific discipline, and EAST set the pattern for the revascularisation trials that followed, through BARI, ARTS, SYNTAX and EXCEL.

Building the specialty’s institutions

He was president of the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions from 1991 to 1992 and president of the American College of Cardiology from 1998 to 1999. From 1997 to 2007 he chaired the Interventional Cardiology Boards of the American Board of Internal Medicine, the body that defined what a certified interventional cardiologist must know — arguably his most consequential administrative work, since it fixed the standard of training for the field.

Editor and educator

King founded JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions and served as its editor-in-chief, and he edited nine editions of Hurst’s The Heart. He continues to serve, chairing the New York State Cardiac Advisory Board and the board of Mercer University, and he remains a familiar presence on the faculty of international interventional meetings.

Why this profile exists

Interventional cardiology tends to remember the operators who did something first. King’s contribution was different in kind: he created the conditions in which the technique could be evaluated honestly, taught systematically and certified properly. Much of what a fellow now takes for granted about how the specialty is entered and assessed traces back to that work.