Democratizing Science Of the people For the people By the people

[Music]

i grew up

on an independent little rock in the

middle of the irish sea called the isle

of man

where open was just our way of life

and everyone knew everyone else’s

business

especially my parents a plumber and a

hairdresser

who taught me that whether you’re fixing

someone’s hair or their toilet

working with the best tools and people

can solve all

of our problems in high school

i was fascinated by science but i found

it cold

and dispassionate it’s language

intimidating

i sometimes still do and yet i’m a

neuroscientist

in my early twenties i worked on skid

row

in la and came face to face for the

first

time with homeless vietnam vets and

addicted moms

about my own age and i absorbed the pain

of mental illness staring right back at

me

i decided right then that understanding

how life changes our brains

could help us understand each other

better

maybe help us tackle society’s growing

mental health

challenges and make this world

a kinda healthier place to be

so i headed off to graduate school got

my brain scientist credentials

professored my way through a pretty

exciting research career

and write at its peak stepped off

neuroscience’s front line

to commit myself to democratizing

science

why because science

is not working the way that we need it

to

science is still painfully out of reach

to most people

and scientific ignorance gets amplified

daily throughout social media

manipulating and eroding public trust in

science with every single

misinformed tweet

ignoring science cost us over a million

lives

this year but i get how this happens

science can inspire great hope but it is

elitist and many of its fields

including neuroscience are complex

and siloed and riddled with failures to

reproduce high-profile findings

why should the public trust us when

scientists

are busy competing with each other or

putting data that cost millions of

public dollars to fund

into inaccessible silos

the good news is that most scientists

do want more open collaboration

and culture change but the ecosystem

that can help make that happen

open science is only just being built

i stepped off my career treadmill to

help my community team up

and share what we know break open our

protected silos and invite in experts

from other fields

to help us change the way that science

gets done

thankfully i found out i was not alone

and together we have grown

the open science movement developing

ways

to look under the hood at each other’s

data and find ways to share

our ideas tools and software

but if we are really going to change

science

and make it impactful we have to reach

down from our ivory towers

and include those who will be the most

impacted by it

you and that is citizen science

some of the most inspirational

neuroscience insight i ever received

hasn’t come from people with md’s or

phds

but from people in the real world

savvy wise 80-year-old ladies in

long-term care facilities

pregnant recovering drug addicts in

women’s prisons

and baltimore daycare moms fighting the

government for the vital food programs

that could sustain their children’s

growing brains

imagine how public trust in science

could change

if those citizens engage in the science

that they care the most about

and then maybe benefit from it

but can science really be advanced by

people

with no formal training in it

in 2015 i joined an obama

white house think tank brainstorming

upcoming challenges in their big data

initiatives including

the brain initiative i was invited back

shortly after to present on how citizen

engagement a true passion of our science

geek of a former president

could transform both science and

experiential

education i came back with a plan

and zoran popovich the university of

washington center for game science and i

got busy building a global neuroscience

lab

online there are 8

billion people on this planet and we are

as similar and yet

different as the 80 billion neurons that

sit inside

each of our heads in our game mozack

you get to become part of a global

village carefully tracing

images of the brain’s neurons providing

stunning reconstructions that

neuroscientists can use

thus far thousands of people from 184

countries

including the isle of man have

participated in mosaic

carefully reconstructing the brain

one neuron at a time providing

vital data that developers need

to be able to take single cells

and reconstruct them into a 3d brain map

for understanding us in mozack

team gamers and retirees work together

on the same team

they feel inspired to learn and

say that they feel empowered

to be at the frontier of science doing

things that really matter

it turns out there are many frontiers of

scientific discovery

that are now available to anyone with an

internet

and seattle is becoming a bit of a

global hub for this

foldit a game out of david baker’s

institute for protein design at the

university of washington

has now been played by over half a

million people worldwide

including my own daughter when she was

in high school

folded gamers are challenged to figure

out how proteins fold

in different environments why is this

important

well coproteins on the surface of fatal

viruses

are the keys that they use to lock in

and attack our bodies

so far folded gamers have solved

co-protein structures for hiv

ebola and now covid19

their strategies will help us to design

new therapeutic locks

that could save many of our lives in the

next pandemic

or perhaps stop misfolded proteins

from gradually destroying our brains in

devastating diseases like parkinson’s

alzheimer’s or als across south lake

union

sage bionetworks one of the world’s

leading open science organizations

run dream challenges these are

competitions

some with monetary rewards that anybody

can sign on to do

to solve patent-finding missions

in human disease data so far

sages dream teams have identified unique

early disease biomarkers

that could help diagnosis and treatment

of bone damage

cardiovascular disease cancer

alzheimer’s parkinson’s and now

covid19 this might be a bit of a

surprise

but getting some traditional scientists

to accept

that regular folk with no formal

training could contribute to

understanding

their precious data has been a bit of a

hard sell

but some of us knew that it was a risk

worth taking

and that it had to stop from within it

is not

that much fun being dismissed belittled

or having your sanity questioned by some

of your more traditional colleagues

but nevertheless we persisted and have

grown a global diverse discovery force

of uber drivers retirees teachers

comedians lawyers and yes

even hairdressers and plumbers who can

hop on a screen

anywhere in the world help us take on

big data

and win one of these

is carmen mandel an argentinian amateur

photographer

who has used her artistic eye to produce

vital data

for nasa’s globe program this

is a program where nasa recruits people

of

all ages and types across the world to

come in and work with their top

scientists

to develop new models to combat climate

change

nasa also reached out this year to this

planet’s citizens

to see if they could help them design a

future when we might have to live

on another one they just completed

a luna lou challenge

publicly sourcing designs for how we

might

one day sustainably poop on the moon

i’m fairly sure that my dad the

highly competitive air force vet plumber

who loved space

and never had the chance to be an

astronaut would have been

all over this one

in the last five years open and citizen

science

worldwide have assembled an amazing team

that has now converged to create a sweet

spot

where our new scientific democracy takes

off

this is where i live it is where experts

and enthusiasts work together

on open data this year

we underwent a major teen growth spurt

driving unprecedented global

collaboration

in scientific discovery when we were all

challenged

with a common enemy covid

19. 3d printer designs

openly shared rapidly produced

masks ventilator parts

facial shields in the parts of the world

where they were most desperately needed

when international data become open

viral dna sequence hot of the pipeline

in china

and early health data out of south

korean hospitals

can be modeled anywhere producing new

viral assays and tracing techniques

and also warning signs for us to protect

the viruses most vulnerable victims

worldwide diversity is critical

in this i’m currently working with

two people-powered projects on youth

mental health

and dementia where different cultural

perspectives will be essential

because people with different

backgrounds see patterns

in different ways and can then make

sense of them

for their own community ambitious

brain projects across the world are now

filling our data banks with

exabytes of data using technologies

where we can now

visualize thoughts and emotions racing

through our human brain connectome

producing

glorious colors as we learn

age or become infected with a virus

each color change is a signature

of how life is influencing our brain

giving us our unique brain fingerprint

each color change could also hold clues

as to whether

we might succumb to mental illness but

we can’t just pop these images in an

algorithm

and get it to spit out magical answers

telling us how we’re doing

for that we need to know the questions

to ask

we need your insight and tech at the

table

scientists just can’t do this alone

ai holds incredible potential

for changing our future but still cannot

match the power of the incredible

pattern spot in human mind

i don’t need a computer program to tell

me which of these

i would rather eat than cuddle

artificial intelligence needs human

insight ideas and innovation

to put that eye into ai

seeing and understanding patterns in 4d

is our super power something my hyper 13

year old can do better than a

supercomputer

you and your mind will be needed

to help shape the artificial

intelligence of the future

and to help keep it humane culturally

inclusive

and ethical we are at an incredible

moment in history

covet 19 might have isolated us at home

but open and citizen science have

created a new scientific democracy

where diverse minds anywhere can hop

online

and work with others in the world to

begin to solve the problems

of our future

the internet is your magical portal

into a people-powered global revolution

to accelerate scientific discovery where

you get to work along sciences leaders

and help carve paths of understanding

through our opening

silos of data

in this science democracy

we all get to share our experience as we

collaborate to make discoveries

that could cure diseases hold back

climate change

discover or explore new planets help

turn brain data into understanding

mental health

enhance our own mental health while

we’re doing it

transform online education and make

science

that we can all trust and believe in

you are the final piece of the jigsaw in

science’s new universe

whether you are an immigrant

undergraduate student developer writing

open software at mit

or a precocious plumber’s daughter on an

island in the middle of the irish sea

thank you