shouting them into my ear, and at the same time I saw them as if they were printed on a piece of paper floating in the air. This was the research Gofman first reported inScience in 1950. He described how his ultracentrifuge“fractionated” lipoproteins into different classes depending on their density, and he noted that one particular class of lipoproteins, which would later be identified as LDL,*42 is more numerous in patients with atherosclerosis than in healthy subjects, in men than in women, in older individuals than in younger, and particularly conspicuous in diabetics, all of which suggested a possible role in heart disease. What these low-density lipoproteins did not do, Gofman reported, was to reflect consistently the amount of cholesterol in the blood, even though they carry cholesterol within them. Sometimes total cholesterol levels would be low in his subjects, he noted, and yet the concentration of these low-density lipoproteins would be abnormally high. Sometimes total cholesterol would be high while the cholesterol contained in the low-density lipoproteins was low.“At a particular cholesterol level one person may show 25 percent of the total serum cholesterol in the form of [low-density lipoproteins], whereas another person may show essentially none in this form,” Gofman wrote. *24 This paradox could also include Switzerland. In 1979, Swiss public-health authories reported that cardiovascular mortality had undergone a“suprising decline” in Switzerland between 1951 and 1976, during a period in which the Swiss increased their consumption of animal fats by 20 percent. Ignoring him, I snapped my fingers, and the waitress arrived.“A coffee and egg sandwich.”