The best of the European Heart Journal: look back with pride

Who would not like to be good, preferably better or perfect? The rule applies to sports, business, and academia alike. Ratings are thus common practice in all areas: we are impressed by gold medallists and champions, AAA ratings for banks and businesses, and more recently also for entire states. Competing with others has been a passion of humans throughout their existence: the Olympics, initiated by the Greeks and continued by the Romans, have been resurrected in modern times. We watch with passion competitions in all sorts of sports events and suffer and triumph with our idols. The events of the Federation Internationale de Football Associations (FIFA)—be they European or World championships—are broadcast and watched by up to 3 billion people worldwide. We all eagerly follow the latest sports news with as much interest as the business reports of the day. In science, Nobel laureates are the ones that we admire—they are the key opinion leaders, innovators, and discoverers. Joe Kennedy, the father of the 35th President of the USA, told his sons: ‘Always come in first. Second place is failure.’ Indeed, in science this advice is as crucial as it is in politics: Who first discovered the HIV virus? Was it Gallo or Montagnier? Who won the race for the human genome project? Who performed the first percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA)? Gruntzig or Dotter? Ranking is important in science and medicine. To be first means to be the first to publish and the last to be remembered. Unpublished findings do not exist. A tragic example was Rosalind Franklin, the dark lady of DNA. In 1951 she was the first to discover the helical structure of DNA in her famous crystallographic experiments, but the findings did not leave her laboratory.1 When James Watson visited her laboratory on 30 January …