Transcriber: Maria Carolina Aguirre J. Reviewer: Reiko Bovee
The universe.
I have a question about it for you.
Has anyone in the room found a planet outside the solar system?
Please, raise your hands.
Me neither, yet.
But if you go to the webpage "planethunters.org"
you can look for planets, from home.
NASA's Kepler Mission is generating millions of signals,
and we don't have enough astronomers to look at them.
So here, online volunteers go check the pattern,
and if they find a discontinuity,
that means that maybe there is a planet out there.
So far, they have analyzed 13 million potential planets.
And they have found more than 30 planets!
Probably one is like the Earth.
In the Earth we have life,
and critical to life is DNA,
which is like the instructions manual of life.
With DNA you produce proteins,
which are three dimensional structures,
and turns out that looking how proteins fold
is one of the most important problems in biology.
In the online game Foldit,
which is like a three dimensional Tetris,
players fold proteins looking for stable structures.
Last year, 30 thousand Foldit players made in 15 days
what biologists couldn't have done in 15 years.
In fact, one of the best proteins folders of the world
is not a scientist, neither a supercomputer,
is Caroline, a British nurse, that after her job, goes home and folds proteins.
(Laughter)
Looks like to continue with the presentation
and to prove that I'm a human, not a robot.
I have to type a couple of words here. So let's see...
Purple 2 1/2. Ok. Perfect
What I have just done, and you all do everyday,
is not just checking that we are humans.
In fact, we are helping to digitize old books
from libraries all around the world.
So, we can find planets. We can fold proteins.
We can digitize old books.
Why not make the crowd help to fight malaria?
We have already heard about malaria.
200 million cases and one million deaths per year.
It's transmitted by the mosquito, that bites you
and put the parasite into the bodystream.
We have seen, there are very cool researchers,
like "Kick-It" that are working, trying to find the vaccine.
But we will still have to wait, five or ten years.
In the meantime, the WHO recognizes
the optical microscopy as the gold standard to diagnose malaria.
That means, you take a blood sample,
you put a dye, you put it under the microscope,
you check whether there are parasites or not,
and then you count the number of parasites.
The more parasites, the more severe is the disease.
And this takes about 20 minutes for an specialist.
So, I asked myself: OK, maybe, I think,
I do believe that people, normal people,
can be trained to count these parasites.
To analyze these kind of images.
To test this idea, some months ago I launched
the malaria spot game.
I put it online.
Here, it's very simple.
Instead of shooting aliens, for one of the 34 planets,
you have to kill parasites, to shoot parasites,
in real, digitized, blood smears.
In a couple of months, more than ten thousand players
for more than 100 countries,
generated a database of almost half million clicks.
I know you are asking: "But does this work or not?"
I mean, I would never trust the diagnosis of someone
that it's not a medical specialist.
Here, the key is this redundancy.
And I mean, if I give the image, the same image to 10 people,
and nine agree that here is a parasite,
probably there will be a parasite.
We made the statistical analysis of all these data,
and we found that 13 people trained for 1 minute,
if you combined their information,
you have a perfect parasite counting, as good as an expert microscopist.
So now, you can think: Ok, I can make a black box,
which in fact is a mobile phone, turn it into a microscope,
you could cut your finger, take the blood,
we send the blood, the sample, the image
to the Internet, people play,
artificial intelligence combines
all these games from different people,
and gives back the answer. A red light or a green light.
If the light is red: Go to the doctor. (Laughter)
You can also ask: "But, do people play enough to do these things?"
If we were the application number one thousand,
in terms of numbers of users, in Facebook,
which is like the horoscope or something like that,
we would be able to diagnose one thousand cases per day.
Overall, humanity plays three billion hours per week, video games.
That means that with one percent we diagnose
all the malaria cases of the world.
And we ask: "Why only malaria?"
We can think in fact, about other biomedical images
with massive production and not enough specialists to check at it.
For instance, pap smears for cervical cancer screening,
or sputum smears, for tuberculosis screening.
And, I mean, maybe we are going to train,
we are really going to train real specialists on that.
I'm sure that people will pay Caroline to fold proteins,
so maybe we will be able to pay people for them doing diagnosis.
It's like creating the "telediagnoser" job.
Specially now that children are digital natives.
They play with Ipads, with computers,
they are used to play in digital worlds
that are much more complex than the actual biomedical images.
If we would do it now, we have more than 5 million
unemployed people in Spain.
If they were to work part time, we would also be able
to diagnose all the malaria cases in the world.
We can say: This is utopic. No
This organization, which is callled "Sama Source"
is already providing dignified digital jobs
to women and youth in Africa.
So the opportunity is global, to diagnose and to be diagnosed.
Before saying goodbye, I would like to show you something.
Here in the screen, on the right, you see big spots.
They are white blood cells, leukocytes. They are good.
On the left, there are small, small, small purple dots.
They are malaria parasites. Shoot them.
(Applause)