I had lunch today with my old college professor during which I took the opportunity to recruit him (and his wife) into our FAH donor community. That went fairly well, so, (thusly emboldened), I attempted to recruit a lady I met this afternoon at our local Barnes & Noble bookstore. I started off with my (now standard) “How would you like to become a medical researcher?” line. This got her attention. After a few preliminaries, I drew an analogy between creating and running a simulation of a large protein molecule with trying to put together a 100,000,000 piece jigsaw picture puzzle. I mentioned that not even a supercomputer can run a simulation with 100 million (or a billion) separate work units within a reasonable time. So, to overcome this problem, the folks at Stanford split this “puzzle” up and parcel it out among thousands and thousands of volunteers (and their computers) all over the world. By breaking a complex simulation up into a lot of smaller work units, they’re able to create a simulation of a complex protein molecule in a few days or weeks - as opposed to several months or a year.
This made sense to her, so she agreed to allow me to write down the FAH web site address on a napkin which she put in her purse. She indicated to me that she would check out the FAH web site. (I also mentioned that there are articles on Wikipedia about protein folding and Folding@Home – to which she responded “Good!”) So it looks like two five minute conversations today may have gotten us two more donor participants who will join the FAH community and start crunching work units. That leaves us a mere 99,998 donors short of the number Dr. Pande says he needs to reach the 100 peta-FLOP threshold. As the late Chairman Mao said, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step,” so we are two steps closer to having 100,000 new donors. (I think it was Chairman Mao who said that … I’m not sure.)
We need catchy (easy-to-understand) analogies and metaphors to help explain what FAH is about and to get people interested – or at least interested enough to visit the web site. A business card will help, (since you won’t have to waste time writing down the URL on a napkin or a piece of paper), but memorable and unique words and phrases will also help. Analogies that are easily understood will do the trick. (The stuff on the home page is great, but we’ve got to get folks to the home page first!)
This is a very creative community. Now is the time to scratch your heads and help me out! If you have a good idea or a good concise way of explaining FAH, there’s no time like the present. Roll the carpet out, light the candle and come up with some really neat ways of explaining what the FAH project is, what Dr. Pande and his scientists are trying to accomplish, the diseases they are fighting, and how prospective new donors can help. Let’s think about ways of getting that number down from 99,998 all the way down to zero or one.
