The prestigious magazine Nature Structural and Molecular Biology publicated an article which revealed the structure of an enzyme used by retrovirus similar to HIV. This discovery has been widely considered as a major advance. And whom solved this enigma? A group of video games's amateurs.
Foldit, a new experience created by a group of scientits and conceptors of video games at the university of Washington asked to the players (some of them still studying at the secondary school and without any scientific knowldeges, and even less in microbiology) to determine how the protein fall back into the enzime.
Within a few hours, about a thousands people confront one eachother and cooperate. Three weeks later, they succeed where the biologists and the computers failed:"It is the first example of video games's amateurs having solved a long term scientific problem", wrote David Baker, co-founder of Foldit at the time.
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source: traduced from http://www.slate.fr/story/51211/internautes-remplacent-entrepreneurs-crowdsourcing
