One of the more intense areas of research in lung disease in the past 40 years has been the
investigation of mechanisms of lung parenchymal destruction by in vivo enzymatic
proteolytic enzymes causing pulmonary emphysema and COPD. How this direction of
research evolved is worth recounting because it illustrates how quite different experimental
approaches done in different parts of the world at approximately the same time can give rise
to new conceptual insights that point the way for what were then wholly new directions of …