As a science writer, I often find it sobering to read scientific history. Science works slowly, even though we wish it would work in nanosecond breakthroughs.

But it did not lead overnight to a treatment for heart disease. In fact, it did not even lead, on its own, to a clear understanding of how cholesterol ends up in the blood vessels. Instead, it focused the attention of later scientists on the question of cholesterol. It took many years for scientists to figure out the steps by which enzymes produce cholesterol molecules. Then scientists began searching for drugs that might interfere with those enzymes.

In 1971, six decades after Anichkov ran his egg-yolk experiments, Akira Endo of Tokyo Noko University and his colleagues,