I’ve been contemplating how best to make a quick note about something that I think is an easy way for many computer owners to contribute to medical research; I’ve not yet come up with a good, creative way to discuss the subject, so please forgive the rather abrupt, and perhaps terse, post.
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The Folding@Home project is a scientific research effort by researchers at Stanford University to investigate the role of protein folding in several different diseases, including cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease.
In one sentence, the story is that proteins are clearly involved in many diseases, proteins exhibit the function of “folding” and do so in many many different ways, including mis-folding, and researchers needs lots and lots of CPU cycles to test the way that these proteins might fold.
Individuals and organizations can contribute to the computational effort by downloading and installing software from the Folding@Home project which will run quietly on computers, either in the background at a low priority, or as a screensaver. This software will periodically check in with a project server, download a “work unit” which is just a job to be performed relating to the folding of a protein, crunch that job offline, then return the results to the server when finished, after which it will download another job. The user has full control over the process–you can start or stop the processing as desired.
Anyway, I think it’s a great way for the average person to actually contribute to scientific knowledge in a way that may have a very clear link to diseases we ourselves, or people close to us, experience.
The software will run on Linux and Windows, but apparently it really zings on the Sony PS3’s Cell processor. Kinda makes me want to buy a PS3 and load Linux on it.
