Cancer Research UK urges volunteer citizen scientists to help analyse its data
Howard Lake | 5 December 2012 | News
Cancer Research UK has launched ClicktoCure, an online initiative that aims to crowdsource help from the public in analysing data from its studies of the disease.
The charity is asking 'citizen scientists' to examine images amassed from testing treatments on tumor samples and flag up any that appear to be irregular cells. Thousands of people have already donated their time to the project and 278,962 images have been analysed.
CRUK explains to participants "our datasets still require analysis by real people and cannot be left to computers alone. It takes human intuition and the human eye to spot patterns, defects and anomalies-computer algorithms just aren’t good enough. The process is slow for a lone scientist, but with the collective power of hundreds of thousands of people, we can speed up this research by years".
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The minisite has been created by citizen science organisation Zooniverse who work with NASA and other organisations to run large scale public participation science activities online.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.