Futures in Biotech 41: Modeling Life with the World's Fastest Computer
Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 04:43PM Dr. Pande explains how large gains in computational speed have been achieved with folding@home, and how they are applied to understanding disease.
Hosts: Marc Pelletier and Randal Schwartz
Guest: Dr. Vijay S. Pande, Director of Folding@Home and Associate Professor of Chemistry and of Structural Biology, Stanford University
Dr. Pande's work is at the forefront of both distributed computing and molecular simulation experiments: an extremely valuable combination when trying to model the movement of millions of atoms at a time. Predicting the fundamental processes of life to better understand diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or even cancer is not easy, but with the true ingenuity Dr. Pande and his team at Stanford, great strides have been made.
Reader Comments (1)
I was listening to this episode today, and noticed that there was a bit about 45 minutes in when someone mentioned that it would be cool to have a Wii game that allowed you to 'manuallly' fold proteins. Have you seen foldIt? Their site is here:
http://fold.it/portal/
It is basically just what you described, a fairly realistic protein folding computer puzzle game. It would be cool if someone made it into a Wii game, maybe using the new Wii controller that gives full six axis control, but even now on our desktop you can get most of what you seemed to want in the netcast.