alt Hacker NewsHow many papers have been published as a result of this, and more pertinently, how many "real" things are now being made or used based on that? I'm hoping it's not all just perpetual "regrowing teeth" territory where nothing ever comes from it.
How many papers have been published as a result of this, and more pertinently, how many "real" things are now being made or used based on that? I'm hoping it's not all just perpetual "regrowing teeth" territory where nothing ever comes from it.
This is extremely far from any of my expertises, but I'll offer an answer while no one else did (please correct me!). Basically, all medicine (i.e. drugs) we have are proteins or certain compounds that fit within some of our cell's (or viruses) molecules and does funny stuff to them, like disabling certain parts, acting as a signal to regulate behavior, and so on. Doing funny stuff is basically about fitting into another molecule. So research about how proteins (most molecules (after water) in our body, I guess) interact is incredibly important in basically all medicine, specially in the discovery of medicine (like suggesting compounds (drug) that could fit in certain receptors or perform certain function), and understanding disease/pathologies (which give ideas on how to prevent and treat them).
If folding@home helps to understand and model this behavior of molecules (which I guess tends to be difficult and unreliable to do without the aid of computers), it is extremely helpful. Now I don't know other details like, perhaps molecular biology is the bottleneck and there is scant available molecules to analyze (reducing its impact/marginal sensitivity), or perhaps compute really is a bottleneck in this particular problem. But nonetheless it seems like a great project for which contributions do make a difference.
(Note: although, that said, if you were expecting something like 'compute->miracle drug comes out', I believe that's not quite how it works; research in general rarely works that way, I think because the constraint space and problem space that would require this approach is too large and complicated; and in fact I believe many if not most significant discoveries have resulted from playing around and investigating random molecules, often from (nonhuman) animals, plants and bacteria[1]; although molecular sciences (molecular biology) seem to enable a slightly more methodological approach)
[1] The GLP-1 based weight loss drugs for example came from investigating the Gila monster lizard venom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLP-1_receptor_agonist#History