World Community Grid: Help Medicine at Home! May 13, 2007
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Computer, Genetic condition, Health, Health 2.0, Invention, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Prevention, science, Web 2.0.trackback
Sometimes a good idea and the participation of crowds can make a project fantastic. The World Community Grid has a beautiful mission: to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. I’ve already installed it on my computer and it looks great. The official site says:
Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Our success depends on individuals – like you – collectively contributing their unused computer time to this not-for-profit endeavor.
How can you help?
- Join as a member
- Join as a partner
- Find a team
- Or donwload the program and donate the time your computer is turned on, but is idle, to this project
Where can you help?
- FightAIDS@Home: Each individual computer processes one potential drug molecule and tests how well it would dock with HIV protease, acting as a protease inhibitor.
- Human Proteome Folding Project: it focuses on human-secreted proteins, with special focus on biomarkers and the proteins on the surface of cells as well as Plasmodium, the organism that causes malaria.
- Genome Comparison Project: seeks to compare gene sequences of different organisms against each other in order to find similarities between them.
- Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy Project: investigates protein-protein interactions for 40,000 proteins whose structures are known, with particular focus on those proteins that play a role in neuromuscular diseases. The database of information produced will help researchers design molecules to inhibit or enhance binding of particular macromolecules, hopefully leading to better treatments for muscular dystrophy and other neuromuscular diseases.
Amazing, isn’t it? Some numbers to prove its success.
Members: 293,147
Devices: 621,555
Total Run Time: 89,704 years
Join to help medicine and science! Serve humanity!
Further reading:
Folding@home doesn’t look THAT great (probably; at least it seriously lacks “The typical Web 2.0 design elements: the glassy buttons, “wet-floor” effects, and large fonts”). However, it is able to run on a linux machine from command line with absolutely no nonsense stuff. What if some admins of major apache/mysql/whatever farms would decide to give their idling CPU cycles to it?
Ah, forget it, I was dreaming again.
Check out a blog which discusses the latest news on this device, nike+
Here are some good videos that talk about the world community grid: