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Popović summed up the results of the 2008 competition by saying that “foldit players are on a par, but not better than protein folding experts at trying to solve the same problem with all tools available to them. It also appears that foldit outperformed all fully automated server submissions.” Thus, a team of amateurs can be competitive with some of the world’s top biochemists, equipped with state-of-the-art computers. Popović told me that his “ultimate goal is to show that experts are unequivocally inferior to the general population with this problem . . . a biochemistry PhD does not self-select for spatial reasoning. Structure prediction is all about 3d problem solving and very little about biochemistry.” Indeed, even specialists in protein-structure prediction usually spend only a small fraction of their time working directly on predicting protein structures. And while they have expertise that the amateurs don’t, much of that knowledge is incarnate in the mechanics of the game. That levels the playing field enough that the remaining disparity in expertise can be overcome by the greater time commitment of the Foldit players. It’s a symbiosis: the professionals develop the systematic understanding that underlies the mechanics of the game, and the amateurs then supply the dedicated artistry required to take best advantage of that systematic understanding.

Citizen Science Today

Citizen science is not an invention of the internet era. Many of the earliest scientists were amateurs, often pursuing science as a hobby alongside some more lucrative profession, such as astrology. But even after science was professionalized, amateurs continued to dominate some parts of science. For example, many of history’s most successful comet hunters have been amateur astronomers, people such as John Caister Bennett, a civil servant in the South African city of Pretoria, who discovered one of the most spectacular comets of the twentieth century, the great comet of 1968, Comet Bennett.

Although citizen science is not new, online tools are enabling far more people to participate—think of Galaxy Zoo’s 200,000-plus participants and Foldit’s 75,000-plus participants—and also expanding the range of scientific work those people can do. To be a comet hunter in the 1960s you needed to purchase or build a telescope, learn how to use it, and then spend many, many hours observing the sky. The barriers to entry and to continued contribution were high. By contrast, you can get started on Galaxy Zoo or Foldit in a matter of minutes. It’s even possible to classify galaxies on your smartphone. Aside from dropping barriers to entry, online tools also enable sophisticated interactive training, and bring participants together in communities where they can learn from one another, and support one another’s work. As a result we’re seeing a great flowering of citizen science.

As an example of this flowering, comet hunting has been transformed by the internet. In 1995 the Europan Space Agency and NASA launched a spacecraft called SOHO, which was designed to take exceptionally good photos of the sun and its immediate neighborhood. (SOHO stands for Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.) It turns out that near the sun is a great place to look for comets, in part because comets are very well illuminated there, and in part because their tails are elongated by the solar wind. Ordinarily such comets wouldn’t show up in photos because of glare from the sun, but one of the instruments on SOHO is specially designed to block out light from the sun’s main body so that it can take photos of the sun’s corona—the plasma “atmosphere just above the sun’s surface. The SOHO team decided to share their images of the corona openly on the internet, and many amateur comet hunters began combing through the photos, looking for comets. The most successful is a German amateur astronomer named Rainer Kracht, who spends hours each week looking very, very carefully at pictures from SOHO. In this way he has become the most successful comet hunter in history, so far discovering more than 250