Interesting piece about how citizen scientist projects like FoldIt are calling into question how scientists have been conducting their research until now. "Science is, for the most part, a closed society organized into little fiefdoms of highly trained specialists, which means only a few minds engage with any given problem ...
One reason for the sudden turn to crowd science is that it offers an imaginative answer to a central problem of 21st-century science: too much information. But its early successes, which have shocked even the architects of the approach, suggest that over time pro-am collaborations hold the potential to alter the landscape of science in important ways, harnessing countless able brains to do work that was once the province of a few overwhelmed experts."