Helping cancer by doing....nothing

**Nwahs** · 03-01-2006, 06:35 PM

Did you know you could help cure cancer, by doing virtually nothing at all?

You probably have heard the concept: A little program runs in the background of your computer, only taking whatever spare power there is. It uses this power to play with proteins. The results it gets are sent back to the Folding@home people who use it in medical research.

Collectively we do what a zillion dollar computer could. Therefore diverting funds back where it should be spent- on the research, not the equipment.

You dont need a powerful PC, The program carefully monitors how much processing power is available. You will not experience slow downs because of it.

There is no malicious spyware or anything involved within the program

http://folding.stanford.edu/ Homepage of the site

From the Folding@Home website:

Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), 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.

You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.

Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

CURRENT PROJECTS:

Alzheimer's Disease
Cancer
Huntington's Disease
Osteogenesis Imperfecta
Parkinson's Disease
Ribosome & antibiotics

If somebody makes a team for Howard Forums, I can join with two computers, but for the time being, I'm teamless.
Just another thing I thought was cool. Google has put a bunch of its computer to work for this program, to help them out. Same with SUN computer systoms and other componys. check it out: http://folding.stanford.edu/stats.html

http://folding.stanford.edu/

**Bumpon10s** · 03-01-2006, 08:26 PM

Anyone who wants to do a SETI or folding project is already doing it. This is years old, there is very little we can do to attract more attention than is already in it.

**BigDaddy5** · 03-01-2006, 08:48 PM

I like that you can help with "cancer." There is no 1 cause of all types of cancer, and there is no universal cure for the different types of cancer. There probably never will be either, just based on how different cancers are formed, react, and behave.

I'd rather just donate to professionals who actually perform experiments on individual types, instead of donating a few CPU cycles to calculate a cure for "cancer."

**Nwahs** · 11-13-2006, 04:33 PM

Alright, well I know I'm bringing back an ancient thread, but I started a HowardForums.com team and thought some of you might wanna join. The link is in my Sig