Gamers will help scientists to be honest

Virtual laboratories with video games will save science from fraud

<url>In the fight against the growing level of errors and data manipulation in the biological sciences, online laboratories will help, where information is processed by amateurs using special video games.

This proposal was made by American scientists on the pages of the journal Trends in Biochemical Sciences (Scientific rigor through videogames).

Adrien Treuille and Rhiju Das It is claimed that online games played by thousands of volunteers provide significantly more scientific rigor in testing hypotheses. As proof, biologists cite their own project – EteRNA, a virtual laboratory for the study of RNA.

"Such projects represent a new model of remote research, thanks to which it is possible to prevent the main forms of scientific fraud. More than 150 thousand volunteers participated in EteRNA, who gave about 2 million man-hours to the project. Behind every hypothesis, behind every conclusion, there were many eyes. Everything was going in the open," Trey said (in a press release from Carnegie Mellon University Drop That Beaker: Online Games and Remote Experiments Could Reduce Scientific Fraud, Cherry-picking – VM).

This kind of transparency will not allow individual scientists to correct their hypotheses so that they correspond to the results obtained during the experiment, or choose only convenient ones from a large amount of data. "Few people talk about it, but when the same group puts forward a hypothesis and tests it in the laboratory, there is a conflict of interest. This is one of the reasons for the epidemic of non–reproducible results in modern science," Trey notes.

In modern biology and medicine, even a single DNA or RNA sequencing procedure can yield several billion partial values. It is possible to cover this information by putting forward and testing various hypotheses only for a long time. Researchers are always tempted to give up extra effort and "skim the cream" – manually select the data that allows you to write the most interesting article, Das notes. However, when thousands of volunteers help a scientist, the array of information no longer looks so intimidating.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru08.10.2014