I think the article addressed a very important issue facing the research world today. Research is an expensive and costly field of science. Many experiments take many years to watch and record results. It is very competitive to have the chance to work in a lab, and those who do sometimes do not reap the benefit of seeing their research come to fruition. I have a very close friend who plans on going to medical school who was lucky enough to work in a lab for the past two summers. She enjoyed it, and felt that she was gaining some very useful experience, but she also felt like she wasn’t contributing much. She told me that nothing had changed from one summer to the next, and that she was still collecting the same data on a different level than she had the previous summer. With “Citizen Science”, research is turned into something anyone can do, not just pre-med students. It is accessible outside of a lab, and does not require the monetary backing that labs do. It also yields results quickly and effectively.

Of course, as the article so aptly brings up, trusting the general public with data collection has its risks. At first, one would presume data collected by the public would be faulty and not specific enough for data interpretation. But the article states “even seventh graders got them right 95 percent of the time.” With these sorts of statistics, scientists organizing the data trust the public. Im sure the margin of error is larger than it would be if someone who was trained effectively would do it, but the cost and time effectiveness of it overrules.

I was very impressed with the article. I like how informal science enthusiasts can so easily change into formal scientists, helping to create new data and research.