Folding Forum

Hello..
f@h has been running now since about 2000, correct me if I am wrong.

I got to thinking today that I have never heard about anything truly earth shattering that has been discovered by it...

Please do not think I am having a go at the project by asking this but I just want to know...

What truly ground breaking results has f@h achieved in it's 13 years? What ground breaking discoveries have there been in 13 years of constant computer simulations?

There have been a number of groundbreaking results, record-setting simulations, and useful discoveries.
Have you looked over the papers page or the Wikipedia article?

truly ground breaking

happens like once or twice a century right?

Polio vaccine, Pasteurization, invention of the microscope....

Everything else is gradual evolution...building block by block on previous work.

Just replaced Big Red at IU. = 25X faster than 7 years ago. It will be doing much the same science...just 25X faster.

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/24183.html

The faster the results, the faster you can confirm or deny hypothesis. Moves everything along.

The same with Folding. Develop the tools, validate the results, apply the tools, validate the results...develop subsequent tools....rinse and repeat.

It depends on what you mean by "groundbreaking" or "earth shattering". Most people would consider the discovery of DNA or penicillin to be pretty groundbreaking, and both were. A drug that cured Alzheimer's or prevented cancer without any significant side-effects would be earth-shattering in it's own right. But I believe that there's a different type of groundbreaking, one that is at a smaller, more fundamental scale.

mdk777 is right. It's a step-by-step process, and a lot of fundamentals have to be done before any drug can even get close to be proposed to the FDA. For example, you have to first understand the system the drug affects, what causes that system to not work properly, and the dynamics of how the presence of the drug changes the playing field. This basic research takes time, money, and a lot of effort. Too often this foundational work goes unappreciated, but it's absolutely necessary. This research can be done in the lab, or with powerful supercomputers. If there's a tool out there that can drastically accelerate the rate at which this foundational work is completed, provide information that is unobtainable through lab experiments, and it's relatively inexpensive, well I'd consider that pretty groundbreaking myself.