Folding Forum

Hi,

The moment I learned online that one could make computing power available to fighting COVOD-19 virus, I immediately installed Folding At Home.

I soon saw that I could only participate in the following:

Any desease
Alzheimer's
Cancer
Huntington's
Parkinson's

I assume that selecting "Any desease" is only for the listed diseases and not the COVID-19 virus.

I think now many people would appreciate including this selection of COVID-19 on this list and URGENTLY.

COVID-19 can't be added to the list urgently, it would require a new client.
But it IS included in "Any disease", and it has a higher priority than anything else, so you WILL get COVID-19 units while they are available (and there is no shortage, now or in the immediate future).

I can't help but feel that the worst that can happen is that you inadvertently help to cure the 'wrong' serious disease. Is there a downside to that?

The same thought had crossed my mind as well. But ultimately, lets just hope our scientists allocate these resources as and when they think is best for everyone.

To be fair though, your PC might end up curing all forms of cancer, and you'll never ever know it was your PC or even be paid a penny from of it, lol (obviously that's not the point of FAH, albeit it would be nice).

All the results of F@H are public domain, free to be used by anyone.

The scientists/administrators/programmers/etc. working for FAH are really pretty busy trying to up-size as fast as they can and eventually get ahead of the rate that new donors are joining the search for COVAIDs susceptibility to various chemicals/drugs. Somebody needs to break away from the up-sizing efforts long enough to allow you to formally express a preference to have your computer work on COVAID research.

In fact, there are very few who want to work on anything else right now, so lacking the ability to let you express that prefernce, they have simply that EVERYONE wants to work on COVAID and they've established a policy that all covaid pojects will have a higher priority than anything related to Alzheimer's / Cancer / Huntington's / Parkinson's / or something else.

We need help. I appeal to you: How about you volunteer to stick around the forum and give that answer (in your own words) to everybody who asks more or less the same question has been reassured or a new client can be released with one more choice or a cure is discovered.

This is not an idle suggestion. We all are are volunteers here. You can help by volunteering to simply supplying the answer to that single question for the next several weeks / months / years.

(in fact, most of the scientists working on this project are volunteers, too. We' are NOT a part of "big pharma", expecting to reap profits from selling a new drug to the world.

And that is the role I see for myself, I answer easy questions so the more experienced volunteers like bruce can take on the challenging ones I am unable to respond to. (the actual F@H folks have a really bold dark blue username, and like bruce mentions, they are swamped just getting infrastructure to work for 20 times more PC donors in the last two weeks)