I've been running Folding@Home for 2,5 years now, and I've done my share of running Rosetta@Home on BOINC as well.
What do you say, let's revive the F@H VGChartz team and create a BOINC team as well (if there isn't one already). WHO'S WITH ME?
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Soleron said: I don't run these things because I see little evidence they actually work. With Folding@Home, they have 96 papers published due to the data, and most of them have low citation counts. This is from the work of tens of thousands of computers for several years. To the participants it's more of a game for points than any real scientific advancement. The overhead of packaging, distributing and accounting for units of work is much more than when using supercomputer time. |
Where can you see the citation count? It would be interesting to see.
And Folding@Home DOES generate useful results. They are actually developing a new drug to treat Alzheimer's, this wouldn't have been possible without their simulations.
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In a paper just published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, we report on tests of predictions from earlier Folding@home simulations, and how these predictions have led to a new strategy to fight Alzheimer's Disease. While this is not a cure, it is a major step towards our final goal, some light at the end of the tunnel. The next steps, now underway in our lab, are to take this lead compound and help push it towards a viable drug. It's too early to report on our preliminary results there (I like to only talk publicly about work after it's passed through peer review), I'm very excited that the directions set out in this paper do appear to be bearing fruit in terms of a viable drug (not just a drug candidate). I hope I'll have more to say in the coming months! |
