Folding At Home⚕️

Folding At Home⚕️

Edit 19th June 2023 – a self explanatory tweet explaining why I have “folded”

Edit 15th Feb 2023 – I’m very self critical – so how does what follows below square with my recent twitter post below?

My wife used to be a nurse and I’ve got a science degree. We both had every vaccine required of us up until they introduced the “no pharma liability” experimental #mrna #CovidVaccines And now that they’re mixing mrna with all #vaccines we’re never going to have another. #NoTrust

https://twitter.com/gilesmorris/status/1625539777763188737

The tweet applies to prophylaxis only. But, if I developed stage 4 cancer, or Parkinson’s, for examples, I might consider an experimental mRNA treatment out of desperation. Otherwise my risk/benefit analysis is to rely on my immune system for prevention.

Original post ….

Today I thought I’d write a post about foldingathome.org.

Foldingathome.org is a complex distributed computing network that uses the computational power of your pc to examine novel protein structures in order to help design therapeutics to help mitigate or cure disease and degenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

“Folding” in our community refers to running simulations of proteins, the molecular machines that perform most of the active processes we associate with life, from muscle contraction to sensing light and digesting food. We exploit the biological insight these simulations provide to inform drug discovery and other efforts to combat global health threats.”

https://foldingathome.org/?lng=en

The video below gives a little insight into why protein folding in humans is so significant.

I came across this initiative in early 2020 as the world was starting its attempt to deal with SARS-CoV-2 and I wrote a short post about it here.

I had three main reasons for getting involved as follows:

  1. My mother has been living with Parkinson’s disease for circa 15 years now;
  2. I thought it might help fight the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and
  3. I wanted to do something for charity without wasting my money on paying the salary of some fat cat charity director.

Foldingathome, like mining for “proof of work” crypto, pushes the processing power of a pc using electricity in the process and generating heat as a by-product. Probably the most annoying aspect of this is the persistent fan noise required to keep the processors cool.

I used to fold using two or three computers and leave these on all day, but now I only use my main desktop and turn this off in the evening.

I estimate that the average cost of electricity (in the Isle of Man where electricity is not cheap) is about £60 per month.

As of today, per this text file from foldingathome, there are about 126,000 ”teams”. I am team 239,189 and I am ranked approximately 840 out of 126k since I joined roughly 3 years ago. That puts me in the top 1% of folders worldwide 😁.

I’m rather pleased with that and my attic office is always warm and welcoming.

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