Could ‘Citizen Science’ Be Better Than Academy Science?

A team of volunteer scientists with the FoldIt project recently deciphered the folding of a protein important in AIDS research.

Image courtesy of FoldIt.

Crowdsourcing — drawing from many people’s brains, often from all over the world, to solve a puzzle — has made its way into science research. In the process, it is “breaking down some of the old divisions between the highly educated mandarins of the academy and the curious amateurs out in the world.”

That’s according to Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist who writes for The Boston Globe.

In the recent column “How crowdsourcing is changing science,” Cook writes: “Science is, for the most part, a closed society organized into little fiefdoms of highly trained specialists, which means only a few minds engage with any given problem.” But this “new approach to the conduct of modern scholarship, called crowd science or citizen science” has, in the last few years, “generated notable contributions to fields as disparate as ecology, AIDS research, and astronomy.”

This new approach, Cook adds, is challenging traditional ideas about where scientific innovation will come from:

Its early successes, which have shocked even the architects of the approach, suggest that over time pro-am collaborations hold the potential to alter the landscape of science in important ways, harnessing countless able brains to do work that was once the province of a few overwhelmed experts. And as it does, it also offers an uncomfortable insight: There are ways that the structure of modern science may actually be limiting what we can learn.

Cook, who tweets at @garethideas, describes one project where scientists at the University of Washington “created a game called FoldIt, which gives players an image of a protein molecule and video game-like tools for folding the molecule. As the energy required to maintain the molecule in a particular shape drops — meaning it’s closer to nature’s solution — a player’s score increases.”

FoldIt, Cook continues, “is a potentially addictive game that requires excellent spatial reasoning. Some players excelled at it — indeed, some became whizzes, and the researchers put their skills to work on unsolved problems.