Folding@Home
I’d like to introduce you to a project called Folding@Home. It is a distributed computing project that uses your spare computer processing speed to help calculate/compute research for protein folding. When proteins do not fold correctly, there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
This is a great project and is run by Stanford University. We call want to do as much as we can to eliminate devastating diseases such as cancer, and you can do a part. Just by running a small piece of software on your computer, and even keeping your computer on when you’re not using it, you’ll be helping fold proteins, which has already lead to much advanced research and greater understanding on certain diseases. I strongly encourage everyone to take part - it costs you nothing, but could mean everything.
I’ve been running the Folding@Home client on several of my computers for a few years - you can see my stats. So check out their homepage for more information about protein folding and the research they’ve already accomplished, and even download the client to help out.