My father passed away from esophageal cancer on February 11, 2009. As such, one of the things that I often feel guilty about is not doing anything for cancer research.
In an effort to advance cancer research on his behalf (with admittedly little effort on my part), I downloaded Folding@Home which is a computing project that is similar to SETI – in that you download work units to process and then you return the results to a master server. It’s called “distributed computing”. The essential effect is that everyone who downloads the program performs a small part of a larger puzzle, which can then affect the larger whole. Folding@home’s focus is analysis of folding proteins which have links to many diseases – including cancer.
It’s got some hardware requirements, and since I recently rebuilt two PC’s, I’ve got enough horsepower under the hood to put it on both. If you’ve got an older computer, you might want to check if you can run it – it can slow down your PC if you don’t have the processor or RAM to run it.
If you’re reading this because you know me, or because you’ve lost someone to cancer, or know someone who has cancer, I would ask that you download Folding@Home and let your PC do some work for solving the cancer puzzle. I built a team so that anyone who knew my father can contribute directly in his name. Once you have downloaded the program, you can configure it so that you belong to team # 169588.
Thanks for your time.