Tuyển tập các báo cáo nghiên cứu về y học được đăng trên tạp chí y học Critical Care giúp cho các bạn có thêm kiến thức về ngành y học đề tài: The right to be wrong. | Comment The right to be wrong Gregory A Petsko Address Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center Brandeis University Waltham MA 02454-9110 USA. Email petsko@ Published 29 February 2008 Genome Biology 2008 9 102 doi gb-2008-9-2-102 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at http 2008 9 2 102 2008 BioMed Central Ltd The hardest promises to keep are the ones we make to ourselves. I promised myself that I wouldn t write about the presidential campaign this year at least not until the candidates from the two major parties were decided. I had no wish to add to the hot air generated by the bloviating political columnists and other self-appointed experts whose constant presence is one of the biggest reasons I hate the protracted American primary process. I also didn t think anything I could say would have any connection to genomics. Yet as I watched the campaigns for both parties unfold a connection did occur to me - one that seemed not only to be ignored by most commentators but also to be surprisingly relevant. It has to do with the issue of flipflopping - of changing one s position on an issue. In the 2004 presidential election Republican incumbent George W Bush got a lot of political mileage by painting his Democratic challenger Massachusetts senator John Kerry as a flip-flopper on the issue of the Vietnam War. Kerry had fought honorably in that war - a war that George W Bush had managed to avoid participating in by virtue of family connections. But after returning to the US Kerry decided that the conflict had been a tragic mistake and he spoke out against it at numerous rallies. So successful was Bush s campaign rhetoric in portraying Kerry as someone without principles that a large segment of the voting public came to believe that the decorated war veteran was less patriotic than the man who had never fought at all an example of doublethink that George Orwell would have been .
