Zuhyc on 30 June 2012
| 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. |
Some reasons why you SHOULD run Folding@Home (by Vijay pande himself!)
Re: Protein Folding Conference (F@h and experiments)
by VijayPande » Fri Jun 29, 2012 5:28 pm
JonazzDJ wrote:A common criticism I hear is that Folding@Home isn't taken seriously by the scientific community. This proves them wrong!
Here's some facts that might be useful for talking to people who have doubts. By every metric used in the scientific community, we do really well:
* citations: I have an h-index* of 55 with over 10,000 citations, primarily due to our work with FAH.
* awards: due to FAH, my group and I have been awarded key prizes. Most notably, I'm only one of two people to win both the Protein Society Young Investigator Award and The Biophysical Society Young Investigator award --- two key prizes from the scientific community based on our work with Folding@home. There are numerous other awards.
* grants: we have been very successful in peer reviewed grants.
* papers: our papers are in key, peer reviewed scientific journals
* conferences: my team and I present our work at invited talks at key conferences (I'm at one right now in fact)
With that said, there will be people skeptical about new methods, but I find that these are people *not* in our field (eg not in protein folding) and not familiar with our work. I could see how someone unfamiliar with our work would be skeptical (it probably sounds crazy that we could pull off what we've done, brining millions of people together to make scientific advances). If you encounter such people, probably sending them to the page which talks about our awards (http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Awards), papers (http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers), or citation impact (http://scholar.google.com/citations?use ... AAAJ&hl=en) is a good place to start.
Finally, it's worth pointing out that our key predictions are tested experimentally, either by my lab or others. Our work on Alzheimer's Disease recently published in J Med Chem is primarily an experimental test of previous FAH simulations some years ago.
*I didn't know what an h-index was, so I looked it up, and for those of you who don't know, it means that he has written 55 scientific papers which have been each cited by other papers at least 55 times. The Google Scholar page also gives a i10-index of 145, which means that 145 of his papers have been cited by others at least 10 times. And that truly is remarkable. David E. Shaw, the head of the group that runs the Anton supercomputer, (the 2nd most powerful system for studying protein folding) apparently has an h-index of 16, according to Microsoft's Academic Search.
