When you think of a scientist, it’s probably someone in a white coat working in a laboratory, chemical bottles labeled on shelves, and computers displaying complex graphs and figures. Perhaps you might think of a biologist or a geologist out in the field collecting samples to bring back to a similar lab to analyze. There’s no wrong answer here, but at the end of the day, by definition a scientist is someone who systematically gathers and uses research and evidence, makes a hypothesis and tests it, to gain and share understanding and knowledge (i.e. no big academic laboratory required). Where the opportunity to work in such an environment does not present itself often, experiments can be conducted on a smaller level. Especially during the 17th and 18th centuries, scientific research was booming during the enlightenment era, inspiring individuals in their homes to pursue and generate new information.
Self-made scientists
Enlightenment applied scientific reasoning to politics, science, and religion, utilizing reason as the primary source of knowledge. Enlightenment ideas undermined the authority of the monarchies and religious establishments of the time and as such paved the way for the political revolutions (namely French and American), and laid the foundation for the political and cultural structure of the United States. The Enlightenment related to modern science, many considering Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica as the first major work of the Enlightenment. Describing the laws of motion and gravity based on observable phenomena, Newton’s work inspired thinkers like Locke and Voltaire to apply concepts of natural law to political systems that advocate intrinsic rights, and for the economist Adam Smith to apply similar concepts of self-interest in psychology and economic systems.
This surge of independence and rational thought further influenced other spheres forming it into the practice and method that we’re familiar with today. Because observation, experiments, and reason are embedded in the Enlightenment ideal, science was by-and-large the way to advance human understanding. Through this movement, a Scientific Revolution boomed, creating new standards for scientific methods and practices along with forming scholarly communities and societies. In 1743, a colony-wide society was proposed to discuss and share science, and at the end of each year, “collections should be made and printed, of such experiments, discoveries, and improvements, as might be thought of public advantage, and that every member should have a copy sent to him.” This society, initially called the American Society for Promoting and Propagating Useful Knowledge, merged with the American Philosophical Society a few decades later and still remains a national resource for research. About one hundred years later, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) formed to specifically support science and engineering, and today it’s associated journal, Science, impacts and influences many fields of research and promotes science communication and policy.
With the societal and cultural values of scholarship and intellect and the world of modern science left largely unexplored, enormous advances in all traditional scientific fields were made during the Scientific Revolution, despite the lack of a coordinated effort amongst researchers compared to today’s science. Though scholarly societies existed and held regular meetings to discuss ideas and findings, the science itself was largely conducted on an individual level by gentleman or hobbyist scientists within unused spaces of their homes or offices rather than in established laboratories. It was in these atomised pursuits that Henry Fox Talbot pioneered photography with the calotype process, and Robert Boyle described the relationship between pressure, volume, and temperature. Interestingly, these unprofessional and borderline amateur scientific endeavors were sometimes viewed as more credible than professional findings because of their raw curiosity prevented them from having a bias in the results. Some of these amateurs, having developed extensive knowledge of a particular scientific field, could be labeled paradoxically as “lay experts” highlighting a common fallacy of equating amateur and layperson, a fallacy that persists even today.
Costly takeover
Of course, essentially running a lab in one’s basement is costly. The materials and tools for experiments had to come from somewhere, even if these amateur scientists were using DIY apparatuses. Despite their expertise, by the twentieth century, the class of individual amateur scientists was taken over by laboratories and societies who had better access to funding. This laid the foundations for what science is today: big, systematic, and institutionalized. As such, the concept of gentleman or hobbyist scientist has largely gone to the wayside. More and more scientific advances come from massive groups of scientists working together in institutionalized, state-of-the-art labs as opposed to elegant experimentation in one’s basement.
In part, the shift of how science is conducted emerged from the evolution of science itself. What science is and how experiments are performed have drastically changed since the late 1600s due to the Industrial and Data Revolutions, not to mention the additions of health and safety regulations. Big science also means more coordination of funding for larger projects that involve scientists from around the world. Additionally, there’s more upfront intellectual cost in scientific fields today compared to the mid-1700’s. Now that we have an entire periodic table of elements, scientists must work a lot harder to make or identify elements instead of having the opportunity of discovering oxygen or radium. There are mountains of jargon and pre-existing information that have to be understood, or at least appreciated, before one can go out into the world and find something new to advance the scientific field forward. This last point ties the institution of science with education systems, a topic that could warrant its own article. But in general, the cultural shift of small to large science begs a basic, yet fundamental, question: what is science and who can do it?
New age of DIY science
In part, this goes back to “lay experts,” where individuals may not have had the scholastic foundations of an academic scientific field, but their profession and life experience qualified them as experts of their environment and community. For example, those intimately engaged with different parts of the natural world for their livelihoods, such as miners, fishermen, or artisans have accumulated shared knowledge of the natural objects around them and are attuned to them. When your occupation requires intimate, almost intuitive, knowledge of the rising and falling of tides, you’d notice when they are wrong and observe the patterns that likely produced the changes. If you’re a gardener or farmer, experimenting with plant breeding could yield different flowers or better crops. Their experience with the world lets them experiment and understand it better.
Giving a new meaning to the hobbyist or individual scientist, those lacking in professional scientific training participate in science through active research or participatory monitoring of research projects. Scientific work undertaken by members of the general public is often in collaboration with other citizens, or under the direction of scientific institutions, which makes it distinct from the original “gentleman” scientist. That said, their motives are still driven by a sense of curiosity, responsibility to do science, and desire to serve the wider community. This new kind of network of scientific observation and discovery is termed “citizen science” that decentralizes the ability to do science.
Platforms like Zooniverse, SciStarter, or iNaturalist easily connect people with projects with large amounts of data to parse through and help analyze. Focusing on examples of citizen science for structural biology, a field of research that determines the shape and structure of proteins and protein complexes, crowdsourcing can help eliminate bias in cryo-electron microscopy (cryoEM) analysis, since others don’t have assumptions of what the shape might look like. Some projects help gamify the citizen science process, like FoldIt, a computer game that predicts how proteins fold. (These efforts have been combined to use cryoEM data with FoldIt’s crowdsourcing platform to solve real structures.) All together, these efforts better biochemistry teaching practices, improve molecular modeling, and even solved structures of enzymes involved in AIDS virus replication.
Citizen science changes the landscape in which research occurs. It puts the data in the hands of many to explore and discover new findings. It makes more people more engaged in curiosity and learning by recruiting them into the scientific process. This general concept of crowdsourcing, especially applied financially, gives power to the general public to direct research, making it more of a democratic process towards subjects that people care about or directly impact them. Those directing research projects likely will have to do the legwork to make or join usable platforms, and get their research and data into the public. Following these models, ivory bridges are built out of the ivory towers of academia. In doing so, citizen science not only increases public involvement in scientific practices, but additionally increases scientific literacy and understanding. As such, citizen science combines science communication and outreach that is integrated, useful, and propelling towards education and potentially cutting edge research. Through this process, one can get a sense of community and propagation of research towards something impactful.
Changing scientific standards
Big science as an institution still needs to exist. Some research environments require strict safety precautions and significant amounts of training that not everyone will (or should) have access to, especially research handling dangerous viruses like Ebola or multi-million dollar particle physics equipment like the LHC. The enormous multi-lab collaborations that occur on a worldwide scale are necessary to identify targets and treatments for cancers, or to collect data about the cosmos. But experimental designs, data output, and subsequent data analysis are certainly not off limits to people external to sterile chemical hoods and clean rooms on principle. In fact, this is increasingly the case with the growth of (bio)informatics and data visualization programs. The advent of open access and open peer review additionally allows for both public commentary on scientific research (big or small) that is verified by identified and trusted experts in each field.
Much like the Enlightenment sparking a scientific revolution, citizen science likewise yields a paradigm shift in how, what, and who science is. Given our global involvement in the world with the Internet, many feel the impact the world has on them and citizen science is a way to conversely have an impact on the world through experimentation and discovery. Citizen science projects could address local, regional, national, and international challenges, and encourage authentic curiosity and problem solving in a coordinated way to further scientific research and the communities involved, especially if standards are implemented. Much like the enlightenment put political and research power into the hands of individuals, thus creating a booming population of gentleman scientists, this modern movement likewise puts the power into anyone’s hands. The future of science requires connectivity between big or institutionalized and small or citizen-driven for our research to have as big an impact as possible on our lives.