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RE: folding@home, How much money will the medical cartel make off of the fruits of all that free labor? Do users even know what they're folding? How do users kn

RE: folding@home, How much money will the medical cartel make off of the fruits of all that free labor? Do users even know what they're folding? How do users know that they're not building bioweapons?

ska 7y ago
For the most part this is fundamental research of the type that is typically funded from public grants, these are not pharma companies... As for what they are contributing too, it's all pretty well documented.
dekhn 7y ago
protein folding simulations don't produce a lot of money for pharma (I say that as somebody with a F@H publication to my name specifically doing research on GPCRs, which are a huge pharma target). users can see what the workunits are doing, and choose subprojects, presumably avoiding bioweapons if that's important to them.
- dmurray 7y ago
  How could the average technically savvy user, let's say willing to use Google a bit but not to obtain a biochemistry degree, tell which subprojects are possible bioweapons? Not a rhetorical question.
  - dekhn 7y ago
    Typically, there is a stated/intended plan for each project. This page lists active projects: https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary Unfortunately, the project pages return a 502 but Google cache helps: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:q6DvOtoa6dYJ:https://apps.foldingathome.org/project%3Fp%3D11714+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:q6DvOt... I'm going to guess that if you inspect each project it has a purported (positive) medical use and you'd have to make a judgement call on each project based on good knowledge of biology as to whether it had a bioweapons application. I doubt, but cannot say for certain that F@H won't have any projects that are stated as bioweapons and I'm skeptical that somebody working on a bioweapon would try to cloak its intent, and come up with a plausible medical application so they could get free F@H cycles. I remember the days of logging into national labs supercomputers and seeing the other jobs on the system, such as job_name "submarine_geometry_optimizer" and the user_name was "electric_boat" or something similar.
    - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
      Thanks for answering my questions which were also not rhetorical.

ska 7y ago

For the most part this is fundamental research of the type that is typically funded from public grants, these are not pharma companies... As for what they are contributing too, it's all pretty well documented.

dekhn 7y ago

protein folding simulations don't produce a lot of money for pharma (I say that as somebody with a F@H publication to my name specifically doing research on GPCRs, which are a huge pharma target). users can see what the workunits are doing, and choose subprojects, presumably avoiding bioweapons if that's important to them.

dmurray 7y ago
How could the average technically savvy user, let's say willing to use Google a bit but not to obtain a biochemistry degree, tell which subprojects are possible bioweapons? Not a rhetorical question.
- dekhn 7y ago
  Typically, there is a stated/intended plan for each project. This page lists active projects: https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary Unfortunately, the project pages return a 502 but Google cache helps: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:q6DvOtoa6dYJ:https://apps.foldingathome.org/project%3Fp%3D11714+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:q6DvOt... I'm going to guess that if you inspect each project it has a purported (positive) medical use and you'd have to make a judgement call on each project based on good knowledge of biology as to whether it had a bioweapons application. I doubt, but cannot say for certain that F@H won't have any projects that are stated as bioweapons and I'm skeptical that somebody working on a bioweapon would try to cloak its intent, and come up with a plausible medical application so they could get free F@H cycles. I remember the days of logging into national labs supercomputers and seeing the other jobs on the system, such as job_name "submarine_geometry_optimizer" and the user_name was "electric_boat" or something similar.
  - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
    Thanks for answering my questions which were also not rhetorical.