what has folding@home done for us?

Hi

Dont think that they have cured anything as yet directly, indirectly however the work and number crunching folders are doing with the protein data is a major step forward in understanding the relationships between disease types ( Cancer, CJD, HD etc ) and the molecular makeup of the human body and its proteins. This work is invaluable and could in all likelyhood indirectly lead to cures for many diseases, Cancer is a tricky one as too many varients that need difference solutions, so while they may find one likely cure it may not be a cure-all.

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Science
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-Diseases

Out of these research papers that Stanford scientists have published, like many research papers others expand the knowledge and take the research in different directions, I've seen some of the projects we are undertaking change/expand over the years when new information and techniques are revealed or stumbled upon.

The main crux of folding is that to research and understand proteins and how they fold would take for one protein run 30yrs to get a restult, so by combining 100k+ of PCs you create a grid computing cluster( distributed computing), which can do this work in hours/days, which by using distributed computing and home PCs around the world helped the Human Genome Project (Folderol) in understanding the data that they found which was over 50, 000 genes and 3 billion nucleotide base pairs. This work is still going on in analysing the data which will with the folding@home work lead to some cures, sadly medicine and gaining cures or treatments takes time, not to mention the years that any drug needs to go through phase testing.

As for is it close to finding a cure for cancer, well who knows, they may stumble upon a right set of proteins tomorrow which could lead to a breakthrough, or it may take many many more years.

Doctors, Scientists and Researchers all would love to find a cure for many diseases right now and I know many tirelessly work to achieve this but in reality its not going to happen quickly, last project I just finished took 3yrs to collect the data, and now likely to take another year to release the results, in that time a different drug appeared and is now in testing and again will take us 2yrs this time to see its effect on patients, so from research it generates new avenues to take, slowly I know we are understanding the debilitating eye disease called macular degeneration and learning the various lesion components that make up this disease, how various treatments work (most experimental) and using new technologies to diagnose it quickly.

So is this method of using voluenteers PCs to aid research a waste of time? NO not at all.