Folding Forum

I’ve managed to stumble across a very interesting web site (i.e. http://www.TED.com) which features talks by interesting people from all walks of life addressing subjects of widespread interest – as well as esoteric topics such as “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Orgasm” – as well as other interesting topics. (A friend has informed me that "TED" is an acronym for "Technology, Entertainment, Design" so protein folding, distributed computing and FAH would certainly fit in with the "T" in TED.) I also listened to a talk by Microsoft founder Bill Gates on the importance of reducing carbon dioxide emissions to zero by the year 2050. (There are over a thousand of these interesting and stimulating talks on the site.)

While listening to one of the talks, I suddenly wondered if perhaps Dr. Pande has already given a “TED” talk? So I did a search on “Vijay Pande” hoping to find a hit. When that search produced no results, I did a search on “Protein Folding” and came up with these matches.

http://www.ted.com/search?cat=ss_all&q= ... ing&page=1

A quick cursory examination of these hits reveals nothing (or very little) specifically about protein folding or the Folding@Home project, but I did notice a talk given by Dr. James D. Watson on how he and Dr. Francis Crick discovered the structure of the DNA molecule. I have no idea how the TED organizers would respond to a proposed talk by Dr. Pande on the subject of protein folding research and Stanford’s Folding@Home project, but it occurs to me that this might be a perfect forum for Dr. Pande to describe the project, talk about the project’s achievements, and solicit new folders. The audiences for many of these talks appear to be better educated more aware individuals – precisely the kind of folks we would like to reach. Better yet, this web site appears to be widely trafficked, so there’s a good chance a half-hour to 45 minute presentation (followed by a brief Q&A period) might go over very well … not to mention that such a talk by Dr. Pande (available for viewing on the TED site) would be accessed and seen by potentially thousands of new folders. This seems like a low cost, high return (potentially high return) endeavor – a no-brainer.

It would be amazing if Dr. Pande or someone else where to do that. There's a lot of videos, talks, and presentations that you can find from them three to five years ago, but lately it's been pretty quiet.

Finding the time is key. I think they're all very busy. On top of his F@h managment responsibilities, Dr. Pande also teaches classes at Stanford last I checked.

Seems that if he just did a talk on "if or how" distributed computing has advanced or hindered his research and the obstacles faced. That would be an interesting talk. As it seems to be a fairly successful growing implementation.

Well, I think there's a distinction to be made here between full TED conferences and TEDx conferences. Full TED conferences are put on by TED themselves, and tend to be much rarer, happen much less often, etc. However, TEDx confrences can be put on by pretty much anyone, anywhere, so it might be good to talk to some local TEDx organizers if they'd like to have him there, since that seems like the best option for getting him to give a talk.