Click to viewLast week I asked Microsoft to bring Folding@Home to the Xbox 360 to add a boatload of computing power to the Alzheimer's fight. Well, Folding@Home isn't the only distributed protein-folding program around, don't-cha know. There's also Rosetta@Home, a program that happened to receive over $10 million from the Gates Foundation for HIV research last year.
Meanwhile, Xbox Live has been opened to developers via the XNA Game Developers Framework for about a year, allowing people to develop programs on their own for the system. Like… folding programs?
When asked about it on the project's message board, head scientist and developer David Baker said that "we have been discussing this idea with Microsoft quite a bit over the past several weeks; I will keep everybody posted."
Iiiiiiinteresting. This quote is from last October, so it's unclear as to what the status of this project is, but we sure hope this rumor has legs. Of course, any serious distributed folding program would be developed outside of the XNA framework, but it's interesting that this is how he responded when asked about XNA specifically. Having legions of PS3s helping to cure Alzheimer's and legions of Xbox 360s helping to cure HIV sounds like something even the most diehard fanboys can get behind.
Thanks John!
DISCUSSION
jakemikey: "We're folding proteins, not curing diseases."
God dammit, you're going to make me break out the blockquote again.
What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? 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.
Get it? Protein folding is critical to "virtually all of biology," but is still "in many ways a mystery." When proteins don't fold the way they're supposed to, you get problems.
The project is only a few years old, and these criticisms smack of, "If you're so smart, how come you haven't cured cancer yet?" For fuck's sake people, it's called science. Deal.