Louis Ignarro: Once we ordered the authentic nitric oxide and we found that it was a vasodilator — it dilated the arteries just like nitroglycerine — we then tested this nitric oxide further. And we found that it could lower the blood pressure. We found that it could prevent stroke. It could actually prevent — we have certain cells or elements in the blood called platelets, and when they aggregate or clump together they could block arterial blood flow. And if that occurs in the brain, that’s a stroke. If it occurs in the heart, it’s a heart attack. So we found that nitric oxide was very, very powerful in preventing that. Okay. Then we synthesized some chemical molecules that make it a lot easier to test nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is a gas. Very hard to add gases to your testing systems. So we had a solid material that had the nitric oxide built into it. So when you put it in solution, it releases the NO or the nitric oxide. So we could do a lot of experiments with that. So we had published many papers showing how powerful nitric oxide was to prevent all the cardiovascular diseases that we knew about: heart attack, stroke, it drops the blood pressure. We also found that it could prevent or slow down the development of atherosclerosis or cholesterol plaques in arteries.