For most families, one of the worst parts of the lockdown is the waiting around. Waiting for the lockdown to end. Waiting to see if your kids will go back to school this year. And, of course, (re(re(re)))thinking of the situation. While you’re waiting around for something to happen. Yep. Waiting.
If you just happen to be a molecular biologist, then this is your time! You can take your very expensive education, with some cutting edge software, and try to figure out how the virus works and how to kill it! Or at least slow it down.
However, if you’re not part of the smallest fractions of one percent of humanity that has this skill set… you can sit at home. And wait. But if you don’t have the skills to figure out the coronavirus and win the Nobel prize, maybe you can help the people who can stop the coronavirus?
Back in 1999, software called Seti@home was launched to help scientists who are searching for intelligent life in the universe. Tons of information was being collected by radio-telescopes, but they just didn’t have enough computers to sift through all of the data. The Seti@home app could be loaded on any home computer to “donate” processor time. The application loads packets of data to your computer and looks for patterns that might indicate an intelligent civilization. Seti hasn’t yet found any intelligent alien civilizations, but at its peak over 3 million home computers were searching for aliens.
Maybe finding little green men isn’t your cup of tea, but what if that same distributed technology could be used to… do the grunt work of molecular biologists that are trying to solve the coronavirus problem? Well. This is your lucky day!
Folding@Home is a project designed to figure out how proteins fold and unfold themselves, using distributed computing power similar to the Seti@home model. Without going into all of the technical details, which I freely admit that I can barely understand, proteins change their shape as they perform actions. Actions like replication. The same protein can look like a long thin string, and a minute later can look like an accordion.
Understanding all of the shapes a virus can take tells a biologist a lot about how it works. Put a kink in the folding process and you can slow down the replication of a virus, make it less infectious, or even destroy it. That’s why understanding the folding process is so important. But proteins can fold in trillions of different ways. Revealing the secrets of protein folding requires massive amounts of computation power.
Stanford University originally targeted cancer, Parkinson’s, ALS, and other perennial disorders. Now their efforts are focused on the coronavirus.
There may not be time for you to go back to school to become a healthcare worker and pitch in on managing the pandemic. But, you can help… today! … by downloading Folding@Home on your computer.
It just takes a couple of minutes, it’s free, and it doesn’t expose you to any risk of contamination. You may never know if the work that your computer performs is the key piece that solves the pandemic. But you can be part of a very significant effort, and you just might save the lives of thousands of people.
Besides. It is better than binge-watching another show on Netflix! What do you think? What’s the best way to use our copious downtime? Share your comments with us!