Heal the world... make it a better place

Problems, problems, everywhere…
Not a soul to solve

OK, OK, I admit that is a weak rip-off of the Ancient Mariner, but hey, I have tougher problems to tackle. Oftentimes, you get so overwhelmed by the myriad problems around you – from the communal riots in India to starvation in Africa and the incurable pains of AIDS that you just throw up your hands and shrug your shoulders. Maybe you are better-off helping the society by trying to catch the cheat who tops up your tank or the shopkeeper who conveniently “forgets” to give you your freebies.

Ever so once in a while though, there comes an opportunity where you can make a difference to the whole world – in a small yet significant way through projects like folding@home and rosseta@home. Both these projects engage in basic scientific research (to increase understanding of a phenomenon) as opposed to applied research (such as developing a cure for a disease).

Eh? Well, these projects study proteins. Before proteins carry out important biological functions they assemble themselves or fold. However, when they do not fold in the way they should (ie they misfold) they can lead to serious diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancers etc. many of which do not have a cure today.

Because this process of folding happens in about 10 one-millionths of a second (that’s about the time I take to comb my hair) scientists must leverage computer simulations to study them. Some of these simulations could take 30 years to run on a single PC, so the folding@home (FAH) program sends small packets of information to millions of networked computers and collates the updated information in a central computer. You can get a much better explanation of this here.

So, how can I help? I can be one of the millions of PC’s that help FAH run its simulation models by simply downloading a software and letting Stanford access my PC during my downtime! The system is extremely safe, secure and hardly costs anything (if you subscribe to the “unlimited” plan from your broadband service provider) - convince yourself by downloading the pdf from here. The world is supporting is supporting this initiative – PS3 have packaged an FAH client in their application – maybe you can too! Or even better, form a FAH team and try and put India in the rankings map!