"what the hell is a citizen scientist?"

Let me take a whack at answering this.  First of all one science field is very dependent on citizen scientists.  That field is astronomy.  Today many citizen scientists have 12 and 14 inch or even a bit larger telescopes.  Add CCD cameras and a puter and put  auto tracking on the scope and you have a pretty potent scope that is ideal for some types of astronomy within our galaxy.  Those guys can and do perform experiments that simply would be cost prohibitive to do with the large scopes the professionals generally use.  The net result is those citizen scientists do work that is welcomed by the professionals and they are welcomed to publish in professional journals.  Such people have contributed greatly to astronomy.  There are other examples althou I would not expect a citizen scientist to very often make much of a contribution to things like chemistry, physics or math.  For chem and physics the cost of equipment is out of the citizens budget.  But, in math once every generation or so up until about 75 years ago someone shows up from some place in the world that is self taught and has broken some very important new ground.  I know of citizen scientists who have made important contributions to entomology and some aspects of the fossil record and who are welcomed by professionals in those fields.

I personally have a life long love for the common pigeon and have been interested in their genetics since I was a kid.  I have done breeding studies to learn about various mutants our ancestors combined to create the many fancy breeds of pigeons that exist today.  It is really mind bending to learn the complex genetics those historical breeders combined.  A fair number of fancy traits are combinations of up to a half dozen different mutants which all impact the same aspect of the phenotype.  In recent years I have been working with two different academic groups by giving them blood samples they need to do DNA sequencing.  Right now I have two pairs that I am breeding that are critical components of an upcoming paper one of those academics will publish.  He has told me I have contributed enough to be a co author on that paper.  My academic training in genetics is one course on introductory genetics I took as an under grad in 1961 or 1962 when basically nothing was known about how DNA worked.  I took the course because I wanted an easy A as I had self taught myself in high school what was known about genetics at that date.  Everything else I have learned since has been self taught.

A citizen scientist can be someone who is simply highly interested in a topic and self educates in many cases.  He can also be a person who is simply willing to follow a protocol to the letter and make accurate observations.  I agree whole heartedly with Randy.  A citizen scientist can gather first class data that is invaluable to the furtherance of science.  You do not need formal training.  You just need the motivation and interest to try and to learn.  The technical stuff in some fields is not that hard to self teach in some cases, particularly with today's resources.  And in many cases the technical stuff is way too hard to self teach.  I do not think it at all likely any citizen scientist is going to make the slightest contribution to string theory as it simply takes too much math to self teach to any adult.  The occasional 14 year old kid could self teach the needed math but he is going to end up  in college these days 100% of the time.  Math is a bit unusual as it is a young persons game for some reason no one understands.

Dick

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