The scientists behind EteRNA, the 2003 game launched at Stanford to crowdsource potential RNA molecular structures, wrote a new paper analyzing how well the approach worked, stating that “It only recently hit us that EteRNA, despite being a game, is an unusually rigorous way to do science.”
From Stanford’s Scope Blog:
(Rhiju) Das and EteRNA’s co-inventor, Adrien Treuille, PhD, (now at Carnegie Mellon University) think the gaming approach to biology offers some distinct – and to many scientists, perhaps unexpected – advantages over the more-traditional scientific method by which scientists solve problems: form a hypothesis, rigorously test it in your lab under controlled conditions, and keep it all to yourself until you at last submit your methods, data and conclusions to a journal for peer review and, if all goes well, publication.
In this “think piece” article in Trends in Biochemical Sciences, Treuille and Das write:
Despite an elaborate peer review system, issues such as data manipulation, lack of reproducibility, lack of predictive tests, and cherry-picking among numerous unreported data occur frequently and, in some fields, may be pervasive.
There is an inherent hint of bias, the authors note, in the notion of fitting one’s data to a hypothesis: It’s always tempting to report or emphasize only data that fits your hypothesis or, conversely, look at the data you’ve produced and then tailor the “hypothesis” accordingly (thereby presenting a “proof” that may never be independently and rigorously tested experimentally).
