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 throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.
I thought that SETI@home was an interesting application, but this seems a lot more useful to me. I may set it up to run on my file server, which has a 64-bit AMD CPU that’s idle much of the time. It will help justify the electricity costs to run it.
Alan Boyle has an interview with one of the key researchers. As he notes, this isn’t yet the end of the line for embryonic stem cell research–they need to continue, at least for a while, in order to provide a comparison baseline with the new techniques.
This is a huge story if it pans out, and the headline is exactly right. Researchers create stem cells without destroying embryos. I’ve never been as upset about embryo destruction as many want me to be, but if this can take that issue off the table, it will make it much easier to forge ahead. In fact, what’s great about it is that it seems to be a much more promising technique than nuclear transfer:
…it’s not such a surprise that Ian Wilmut, the man who cloned Dolly the sheep a decade ago, recently said he has been persuaded to give up his own cloning experiments, thanks to news of Dr. Yamanaka’s successes.
“Any scientist with basic technology in molecular and cell biology can do reprogramming,” says Dr. Yamanaka. “If we can overcome the issue [of having to use dangerous viruses to ferry the genes into cells], many more people will move from nuclear transfer to this method.”
As the article notes, it’s surprising how quickly they got to this ability. We could conceivably see it in action within a decade, and perhaps within a very few years. Good news for those of us still in relatively good health. It may significantly accelerate our progress toward actuarial escape velocity.
William Sapphire anticipates the telepathigram. Of course it will be called something much simpler like message necessitating the new retronym mindless message. It’s much more unlikely for the retronym mindless message to be needed because of a new co-dominance of thoughtful messages.
A lot of good points over there, the most salient of which is that it’s not so much a generational thing as a “having a life” thing. Young people have a lot more free time to jabber at each other on IM, but for serious work-related discussions, email will remain essential for a long time (though I’m pushing clients to establish internal corporate blogs for a lot of this kind of discussion, to avoid spam issues, and provide better archiving and organization of topics). Also, with Facebook or other social networking sites, you’re limiting yourself to other Facebook members.
[Update in the afternoon]
Speaking of Facebook, as someone who has signed up, but not figured out why, what is a “friend” in Spacebook terms? What are the implications of it?
Bruce Schneier wonders if there is a back door in a NIST/NSA-approved random number generator. This seems like a good market opportunity for Jeff Manber.