Guinea Pig Science or Citizen Science?

That is the question.

Fascinating article, but unfortunately what would truly constitute a ‘citizen science’ is being left out: the relation between science and ethics. What makes a true citizen science, is not a bunch of guinea pig donors or robot volunteers participating — collecting and analyzing data — in the research programs of scientists. On the contrary, a civic action is a renovation of science itself by introducing its intrinsic relation to ethics. A truly citizen science is a way to reform science in a way that would seek to better navigate the catastrophes that have been committed in its name at the expense of the individual.

The goal of science is not to open a door to infinite wisdom, but to pose a limit to an infinite error.

Bertolt Brecht

Often this ethical dimension of the individual is avoided, not only in science, but in the political institutions that attempt to oversee it. To introduce the individual back into science, that science would not simply be a science of the general, research institutes, and university programs,but the individual implicated in its act, is a citizen science as ethical science. In the end, a true citizen science is a call for a certain modesty and distance with regard to its applications and generalization onto a population, i.e., its nuclear development, techno-food, potluck psychotropic medications, techno-insecticides, genetic modification of life, military projects, etc.

Though I have not had time to review all the websites above, the ones that I have are antithetical to anything that could be called a ‘citizen science’, rather they are just more Guinea Pig science.