Since I prematurely reentered grant writing hell, there’s been a bit of delay with the last segment of my blog series on our Gene Wiki renewal proposal.
But in the mean time, I did want to share one interesting vignette that is highly relevant to our last aim on patient-aligned crowdsourcing. In trying to assess whether patients and their loved ones might be willing to participate in a scientific crowdsourcing project, I posed the following question on Twitter:
“Need examples where non-scientists become immersed in science due to personal connection to disease. Pointers?”
The number of responses and the depth of their efforts was really eye opening. Dig into a few of the stories below, which I’ve put into a Storify. There many examples that put a very human face on disease, and truthfully it’s a view that I think we don’t see often enough as basic biomedical researchers.
In any case, it reaffirmed our belief that patient-aligned individuals are very willing and able to contribute to science. More on that in the next post…