Folding@Home 2.0 - An Online Protein Folding Game

a boy named woo writes "Tired of justifying your gaming addiction? Now you can really help accomplish something while you play... thanks to Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher David Baker at the University of Washington." In collaboration with others, Baker has designed a game, called "Foldit," with a practical outcome: players manipulate on-screen images of protein chains and attempt to predict their folding patterns. From the article: "'Our main goal was to make sure that anyone could do it, even if they didn't know what biochemistry or protein folding was,' says [co-creator Zoran] Popovic. At the moment, the game only uses proteins whose three-dimensional structures have been solved by researchers. But, says Popovic, 'soon we'll be introducing puzzles for which we don't know the solution.'"

Comments

Re:----Joke-----

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not a miniature boxer?

Outsourcing bioinformatics!

[cynicsreport]

From TFA:

"My dream is that a 12-year-old in Indonesia will turn out to be a prodigy, and build a cure for HIV,"

We should give David Baker credit for bringing forced child labor into the 21st century! Think about it: thousands of children, solving protein stuctures for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, at $0.50/hour. The prescription drug companies could lay off all their bioinformaticians, outsource their drug discovery program to Indonesia, and cure cancer in one fell swoop.

look mom, no more cancer

[2TecTom]

how about a quake mod?

Re:No Linux version and no source code

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean it only supports >95% of computer users? What an outrage!

Re:No Linux version and no source code

[Anonymous Coward]

I just thought I'd warn you.... Jack Thompson is writing to your mum. He heard about an add-on that lets you shoot law-enforcement genes.

Then there's johnny

[ruiner13]

Johnny discovered the cure for cancer when he was 13. He had the inspired notion to try to fold everything into the shape of a phallus. This, it seems, was the key all along.

National Geographic
March, 2012

Re:No Linux version and no source code

[ORBAT]

And it required administrator privileges to install. Will anyone every learn to problem properly for Windows? Now that's a Freudian slip if I ever saw one.

Re:Is it that hard to actually link to the game?

[sootman]

Thanks. Eds, take note: please use that link in tomorrow's dupe. kthxbye