Rome, a summer evening, on a terrace with a few Brazilian friends, nuns, escaped during the Seventies from the military dictatorship in that Country, which did not appreciate their teaching activities. It is a prayer vigil, the eve of Pentecost. Each of us has a torch that enlightens, with its flame, the starry sky. At the end, the nuns invite us not to blow out the flame of the torches, but to put them all together in a central brazier, already rich with burning fire. We are astonished: fire on fire? Weren’t either the torches or the brazier enough? “The Spirit is fire – Paula whispers to me – it is always new and it is never enough!”.
This event came back to my mind after President Paolo Gresele informed me – to my surprise – of the SISET decision to found a new journal on haemostasis and thrombosis. Yet another journal, I thought immediately, aren’t there already too many around? But the surprise was even bigger when the President asked me - on behalf of the Executive Council of the Society - if I wanted to be the Editor in Chief of the new journal.
I skoff, trying to go around the question, I thank…
Bleeding, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology, BTVB, it sounds like a nice acronym. We choose it at the first meeting, on Lake Maggiore, with President Gresele, the six Section Editors and the editorial manager.
And here I am, trying to write my first Editorial.
But didn’t we say already everything about bleeding, embolism, thrombosis, endothelial cells? Don’t we risk to be late on the market, when all the fresh fish has been already sold out? But no, it's not like that. I recall the poet Hikmet suggesting that I am wrong: The most beautiful of the seas is the one we have not sailed yet, the most beautiful of our children has not been born yet, and the newest thing I would like to say, I have not said it yet.
Let’s therefore ask scientists working all around with platelets, fibrinogen, fibrinolysis or micro-circulation to open their horizons towards a larger and multidisciplinary perspective, looking for mechanisms common to apparently different phenotypes. BTVB intends to host papers that build bridges, instead of erecting walls (physiological, methodological or clinical). Haemorrhage and thrombosis are the two traditional plates of the haemostatic scale, but the pin supporting them goes in a transversal way, from genetic to nutrition, from inflammation to environment, from artificial intelligence to big data, going through gender differences, socio-economic disparities, lifestyles.
The central pivot of the haemostatic scale is made up of a huge amount of people, little studied, because they are considered normal. BTVB intends to host the care (“I care”) of healthy people, an attentive and systematic exploration of the big part below the iceberg, we usually neglect, in relation to the upper part, which is small but visible. Blood circulates everywhere, it is well known, but it is not the same everywhere, also because it meets different environments. We should ‘geo-localise’ those environments in order to better understand mechanisms and events that still escape to our attention.
Paraphrasing Terenzio, the ancient Roman poet, each specialist of an organ or a disease should say
nihil haemostaticum a me alienum puto, I do not consider anything of hemostasis far from me. Cardiologists, neurologists, obstetricians, pharmacologists, surgeons, rehabilitators and many others can consider themselves welcome on the pages of
BTVB.
Let’s start a trip, old and new, with the anxiety, the curiosity and the joyfulness of a long joint experience, with the astonishment and the unpredictability of those young scientists at their first scientific adventure.
Good luck to all, on behalf of SISET, Section Editors, the Editorial Board, and myself, for the attention and the cooperation the scientific community will provide us.
Giovanni de Gaetano
Editor in Chief
