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Distributed Computing Applied to Medical Research
Troodon writes " BBCnews SCI/TECH has an item:
Screensavers could save lives , anouncing the team up between Parabon Computation and the US National Cancer Institute to apply the idle time of home computers in a Seti@homeesque manner, simulating the responce of cancer cells to potential drugs. The sweetner being the _option_ to receive a payment for your troubles. Other new start ups are jumping on the bandwagon, e.g. Popular Power's choice of contributing to research on
Influenza Vaccination, or making a little money with big
business. But with these companies potentially looking forward to a healthy cut in the profits of any new drugs developed etc., should us plebs look towards more honourable projects, such as trying to help research into the global warming, that all these boxes dug out retirement are going to contribute to?"
It could be feasible that a piece of distributed computing software could be bundled with a browser and a dial-up account in a similiar fashion to AltaVista's free service. The big difference would be that instead of banner ads taking up your screen real estate, you have to install a screen saver that crunches data. :)
The business model would then be:
Company (or research institute) needs data crunched, but does not want to pay for computers ->
Company gives data and algorithms to @home service and pays a hefty sum ->
@home service divies out the algorithms to people across the land next time they login to their free dialup account ->
Data is crunched and sent back to the @home service at a reasonable rate ->
Everybody wins
Now somebody is going to get rich off of my idea... it's really painful being this dumb.
"Blue Elf has destroyed the food!"
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop...
Personally, even though these guys would pay me and SETI will just suck my bandwidth, I seriously doubt you'll find one of my boxes running any of these sims. (And I'm a med student, so I've got a vested interest in finding lots of new medical miracles.)
Why, you may ask, would I want to waste time looking for nonexistent little green men instead of helping the dying boy who had cancer but is now smothering under a heap of greeting cards?
Easy. We all know exactly what's going to happen when one of the simulations shows something interesting. It'll be snapped up and patented as soon as the data block hits their servers. You? You'll get a micropayment. If you're lucky, they'll mention your name. If you're the first one ever to find something useful, you'll get publicity shots. Royalties from the patent? Yeah, right. You run these screen savers and all you're doing is helping a greedy bastard get rich. (Yes, I'm sure there are some ethical and altruistic biomedical profiteers out there, but my observation is that they're mostly just bastards.)
The IP rush in biomedicine right now is scaring me. The prevailing regulatory attitude seems to be that life in general is just another resource to be locked up and exploited. I don't care how much they're paying per FLOP, I refuse to speed that process along.
I'm the CTO of Popular Power. Good discussion here, thanks! I really think this technology is neat; we can turn the Internet into a very powerful resource and then use that resource to solve important problems. Our current influenza work is contributing to research that could save millions of lives.
One poster here wondered how good this kind of distributed computer would be at biotech apps. Depends a lot on the algorithm, but for things that trivially parallelize (like random search algorithms, Monte Carlo simulations) it's a perfect match.
Popular Power has been up and running since April. We've had a Linux client out for a couple of months now; download it and try it out!