Folding at Home (what is this?)

[Kyrre Ness Sjobak]

fre, 22.10.2004 kl. 15.48 skrev Gene Heskett:
> On Friday 22 October 2004 02:38, Tom Taylor wrote:
> >On Thursday 21 October 2004 21:21, joelbryan wrote:
> >> Hi, For the sake of science, will Fedora Core participate at
> >> Folding at Home?
> >>
> >> --
> >> Music = Apple iPod + Rhythmbox & iTunes
> >> Browser = Mozilla Firefox & Epiphany
> >> Desktop = Gnome, Mac OSX, Longhorn 4074
> >> Distro = Fedora Core
> >> Language = PHP, MySQL, Python, HTML
> >> Graphics = Gimp 2.0, gThumb
> >> Editors = FrontPage 2003, vi, gedit
> >> Codecs = FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Apple Lossless
> >
> >Hmmm:
> > Folding.  Is this like an origami party?  Or perhaps an envelope
> > stuffing afair?
> >
> > Home.  Whose? Why? Where? When?
> >
> >Hee, hee, hee says he while ducking the tomatoes.
> >
> >Tom
> 
> Its a program to study how proteins fold as they combine to make the 
> end products chemically.  It has quite far reaching implications in 
> the development of new drugs.  Such research requires the sort of 
> processing power thats only available from the organisational aspect 
> of something like setiathome.  I'm currently running seti, but the 
> replacement for seti, called boinc (and I forget exectly what that 
> acronym stands for), I will probably convert to when seti runs down.
> Its also doing various areas of medical research, but isn't limited to 
> that only.  Both would seem to be projects that have potential for 
> the betterment of mankind whereas seti is basicly an itch scratcher.

Who gets the benifit of this research?
Anybody-who-wants-to-download-the-result, or some multi-billion
pharmaneutical reseach company that will use it only for own profit?