[2] Though Sonnenblick's ideas about the relationship between the structure and function of the human heart today constitute medical-scientific commonsense, they were utterly novel at the time.

Sonnenblick grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, and after graduating as the salutatorian of his high school class, he attended Wesleyan University.

[3] With the completion of his residency at Columbia in 1960, he moved to the National Institutes of Health, where he would collaborate with figures like Stanley Sarnoff, Eugene Braunwald, and Henry Spotnitz.

[3] During this period, Sonnenblick published his single-author paper, "Force-velocity relations in mammalian heart muscle" in 1962, which appeared in the American Journal of Physiology.

[4] Eugene Braunwald later told The New York Times that Sonnenblick's work was akin to "what a brilliant mathematician or theoretical physicist does that ultimately allows you to go into space.

With James Scheuer and Leslie Leinwand, Sonnenblick developed the Einstein Cardiovascular Research Office and created the United States' first molecular cardiology program.

[3] Over the course of his career, Sonnenblick trained more than 300 cardiologists and researchers,[2] authored or co-authored over 600 articles, and made contributions to 16 textbooks on cardiovascular disease.