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This article reports that the drug BiDil was recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) exclusively for African Americans with heart failure. The approval does not cover the general population and is, in fact, the first FDA drug approval for an individual race. Congestive heart failure is a disease that still carries with it a 50 percent chance of death within five years, a high likelihood of repetitive hospitalizations and a quality of life that can rival that of the most severely affected cancer patient. The discovery of the particular variances of this illness in the African-American population and the subsequent awareness that a novel treatment can ameliorate this burden is one of the most impressive health care stories over the last several years.