Tuyển tập các báo cáo nghiên cứu về y học được đăng trên tạp chí y học Wertheim cung cấp cho các bạn kiến thức về ngành y đề tài: Shadows on the wall. | Petsko Genome Biology 2010 11 136 http 2010 11 9 136 Genome Biology COMMENT L__ Shadows on the wall Gregory A Petsko In order to thrive writes Boston College Director of American Studies Carlo Rotella in a splendid essay on Magic Slim and Buddy Guy the last of the great 1950s Chicago blues musicians in The Boston Globe 13 September 2010 every genre or style needs both visionary innovators and orthodox practitioners. Without the former it becomes hidebound. Without the latter it drifts and loses its center. But what happens when orthodoxy becomes dogma What is the fate of innovators when they pose a threat not to the accepted view but to the accepted truth The best discussion of that situation I have ever read is over 2000 years old. It s Plato s Allegory of the Cave and it s one of my favorite passages in classical literature. The allegory is presented as an imaginary dialogue between Socrates and Plato s brother Glaucon but it s really Plato speaking. Imagine he says a group of people who are born and live all their lives in a cave. They are forced to sit in chairs facing the back wall of the cave restrained so that they cannot look anywhere else. Behind them at the mouth of the cave is a large fire and between them and the fire is a walkway along which people carrying things including replicas of animals pass continuously. All the people of the cave can ever see are the shadows cast on the wall in front of them by those passing behind. All they can hear are the echoes in the cave produced by the movements they never see. Would they not Plato asks come to believe that those shadows and echoes are reality Would they not assume that the entire world consists of the cave and the shadows on the wall Wouldn t they praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next as someone who understood the nature of the world And wouldn t the whole of their society come to depend on the shadows on the wall It s a powerful image but Plato
