I’ve been aware of the Folding @ Home distributed computing project for years. But, I was never that interested in helping out because I didn’t understand what my spare CPU cycles were being used for. Now, thanks to Bill Bryson’s A History of Nearly Everything, protein folding not only makes sense, it’s exciting!

In 2003, the Human Genome Project was completed, which basically made an inventory of all human genes. But as MIT’s Eric Linder put it, the genome is like a list of body parts, but it says nothing of how they work. Before we make designer babies or wipe out Alzheimers and AIDS, we need an operating manual for how to use all those parts. This operating manual is the human proteome, which would describe how our proteins actually work when DNA tells them to.

Unfortunately, proteins are even more complicated than DNA. As Bryson puts it, “…as many as a hundred million of them may be busy in any cell at any moment. That’s a lot of activity to try to figure out. Worse, proteins’ behavior and functions are not based simply on their chemistry, as with genes, but also on their shapes. To function, a protein must not only have the necessary chemical components, properly assembled, but they must also be folded into an extremely specific shape.”

So, that’s the bad news. The good news is that protein folding is mathematical enough to simulated by a computer. Figuring out how proteins fold is still an insanely complicated one, but with enough time and power, it can be done - and you and I can help! All we have to do to help cure Alzheimers and countless other diseases is let our computers make use of their idle time by downloading this program.

Pretty spiffy, eh?

But that’s not all. Proteins & DNA are, we’re discovering, the ultimate nanomachines - complex, tiny robots capable of quickly building and repairing damn near anything. If we can figure out how they work, we may eventually be able to use them ourselves to build and repair, um… yeah, damn near anything. To some, this is a scary thought. To sci-fi fans, it’s an irresistibly attractive notion. Of course, we’re still centuries away, but the early steps are happening right now, and you can participate! I know I’m going to.