Folding Forum

I would like to cheer my F@h team on and encourage others to join. Is there somewhere I can point folks to that explains some concrete benefit that has come out of the research ? It's all very well to tell people that this could accelerate the cure for cancer, but are there any benefits that humankind is currently experiencing as a result of our folding forefathers benefaction ?

As far as I know there are 2 concrete benefits so far:
1: 100 white papirs has been written on the subjekt of folding. That both include result of the actually result and bagground on howto fold using folding@home http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers
2: A database of the WU that is actually on request from the panta team. Do anyone know who as used it and if anybody can use it?

That's always an important answer to know. I'd recommend that you point them to:
The blogs that are about Folding@home's accomplishments: http://folding.typepad.com/news/fah_achievements/
The information about the diseases F@h is studying: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-Diseases
The 100 scientific publications that were produced as a direct result of F@h: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers

And of course you can pick things out of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

I'd also like to point out that Dr. Vijay Pande (the director of this whole project) has an h-index of 56, which means that he's co-authored 56 publications that have been cited by the papers from other scientists 56 or more times. He's also produced 145 papers that have been cited 10 or more times. In total, his work has been referenced 10,970 times. I think its safe to say that Folding@home has been quite a splash in the fields of medicine and biochemistry. It's a team effort, and every little bit helps.

Beer: The scientific data that has resulted from F@h is available to any researcher upon request. Note that they've got a total of hundreds of terabytes, so the whole thing isn't up for download. That being said, I have run across numerous scientific publications that indicate that they used selected data from F@h.

It is always a pleasure to read you post Jesse_V since you give a nice precise answer to the questions.

Those request is that only from public researcher (universities etc) or also from researcher from the privat privat sector? And if a privat medicin company (like novo nordisk or novozymes) did request some data would that be granted? How does that panda group decide if they should give acces to somebody or deni them access? What process do they use?

Why would they deny access to anyone? PG has always said the data is available to any serious public or private research group.

beer wrote:It is always a pleasure to read you post Jesse_V since you give a nice precise answer to the questions.

Those request is that only from public researcher (universities etc) or also from researcher from the privat privat sector? And if a privat medicin company (like novo nordisk or novozymes) did request some data would that be granted? How does that panda group decide if they should give acces to somebody or deni them access? What process do they use?

I don't know the answer to those questions, perhaps some of the experts on this forum would though. 7im is right, if the data were going to be very helpful in a scientific area everything I've read would indicate that the data would be shared in exchange for attribution. Some popular data, such as for the NTL9 protein (with which F@h set a protein folding record by simulating it out to 1.5 milliseconds) is available for download. (See this page) The PG is a non-profit organization. I suspect that emailing Dr. Pande would be a good place to start for those researchers.

Research which is done by private companies will generally be protected by a patent (consistent with earning a profit for the company). Research (including FAH) done by public universities and funded mostly by grants from the government or other public institutions is generally not patentable and can be used freely by others doing research, whether they are funded privately or by the public.