Folding@Home You Can Help Stanford Cure Diseases

Chances are you know at least one person that has been affected by Alzheimer's, if you have you know what a terrible disease it can be. Have you ever wondered if there was some way you could help find a cure to diseases like this. You can help scientists at Stanford help find a cure to this disease and many others, like Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. No they aren't asking for donations of money. You can help by simply using your computer to run a piece of software called Folding@Home.

Their goal is to find out how proteins fold and misfold, and how this is related to disease. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project, people all over the world download software and band together to form one supercomputer. Explained a little more simply your body folds proteins into different shapes, disease occurs when a protein "misfolds" Folding happens really quickly (I wont get into the technical details of exactly how quick) so for 1 computer to simulate folding it would take around 30 years. Nobody wants to wait 30 years for results, so by breaking down the projects into "work units" and giving them to a bunch of different computers, it will get the job done a lot quicker.

So how can you help? You can start by going to http://folding.stanford.edu/. You can download the software and begin folding. If you happen to have a Play Station 3 the software is already pre-loaded, so all you have to do is go to it on your PS3 and install the program. Its really easy and your computer is working while your not using it. You can even set it so it comes up as a screen saver anytime your computer is inactive.

The fun part is that Stanford knew that competition makes people work harder so what they did is made a competition of this. You can join a folding team, and you get points for ever work order you finish folding. You can then move up the ranks in your team and see if you can become the top folder. There are almost 3 million CPU's that are a part of Folding@home. You can even go look at their results page, to see how much this is helping out.

I know I am always looking for ways to contribute or donate to good causes. This is such a good and easy way to help out. They are looking for cures to major diseases that affect so many people, and you can help without having to give any of your time or your money. All you have to do is let the program use your computer when you are not using it. It seems a simple thing to do, to help Stanford study protein folding and help cure this diseases.