5 ms·
folding@home alone has 223 peer reviewed papers https://foldingathome.org/papers-results/ https://foldingathome.org/papers-results/
by mwill 7y ago
folding@home alone has 223 peer reviewed papers
https://foldingathome.org/papers-results/ https://foldingathome.org/papers-results/
- juskrey 7y agoI was asking about actual progress
- zouhair 7y agoHow do you think science work? It's like losing weight and gaining muscle, you have to work hard at it and there is no moment in time where you can say that that's the moment you lost weight or gained muscle. It is all incremental progress.
- juskrey 7y agoOr it's like a huge citation rings and mutual salary justifications?
- nkrisc 7y agoSounds like you've already made up your mind about it and aren't looking for an answer to your question.
- rumanator 7y ago> Or it's like a huge citation rings and mutual salary justifications? If you have absolutely nothing to add to the discussion, please consider not saying anything at all. You're just adding noise to an otherwise interesting discussion. At least NVidia is doing something. You? You're just wasting everyone's time with your trolling.
- ramraj07 7y agoI left academia after wasting all my twenties believing there's more to it than citation rings. And maybe there is a small amount more. But my conclusion is that in general citation rings (I typically use a more colloquial Reddit phrase involving geometric shapes and descriptions of motion) and ego stroking is the main purpose of academia. Any scientific progress is incidental or often merely accidental inspite of people trying not to move the needle for personal gain. "At least Nvidia is doing something" - like what exactly? Sounds more like a PR move than anything. They can have a more tangible effect donating money for actual efforts to help people probably. Whenever I said "something is better than nothing" my dad would immediately reply, "but nothing is better than nonsense." He was a smart man indeed.
- kinleyd 7y agoThanks for your honesty. I'm not from academia but I have made similar conclusions in my own area. I'm trying to find what I can pass on to my children to save them some time, but it's awfully hard.
- rumanator 7y ago> I left academia after wasting all my twenties believing there's more to it than citation rings. And maybe there is a small amount more. I also worked quite a few years in academia, including participating in a few international research programs, and although the indentured servitude facet is indeed the problem and the "publish or perish" pressure puts an emphasis on an aspect that is not very relevant, I have to say you're completely overblowing and misrepresenting stuff that has no meaning or consequence. If you ever had a career in academia you'd be clearly aware that the only thing that counts is whether your paper gets approved. Citation volumes are entirely meaningless beyond the vanity aspect of it all, as it only has an impact in main path analysis, and only if you use an algorithm that weighs edges wrt connectivity, which is a bit meaningless. Thus you're complaining about something that at most has an impact on your search results, and only if you are a competent researcher who doesn't exercise any independent reasoning, which is absurd. Thus, what leads you to believe that your concerns are meaningful or relevant to the discussion? It feels like you tried desperately to pull an appeal to authority that has no substance or merit, quite frankly, and in a way that puts your credibility into question.
- matz1 7y agoThe poster make a good point, bunch of papers is not actual progress, huge citation rings and mutual salary justifications is a big issue with these papers. An actual progress probably would be something like : effective cure for a disease found.
- Goladus 7y agobunch of papers is not actual progress That all depends on the content of the papers. Protein folding is immensely complex. An actual progress probably would be something like : effective cure for a disease found. This is such a silly way to frame things. Often the reason you don't know a cure for a disease is because you aren't even really sure what causes the, or even if the disease has just one cause. You might imagine we're waiting for a "Cure for Autism" but what if we eventually discover that there are 20 different conditions that might manifest as autism and each one needs a separate treatment? Do you have the patience for that or will you just throw your hands in the air and complain about no progress? There has been lots of progress in therapies and treatments for diseases, much of it hampered by the fact that protein interaction and biological pathways are so complex and there's so much we don't understand. So before we can "find a cure" we need to understand how the systems work. For example, in 2009 a drug called Cetuximab was approved to treat colorectal cancer, but ONLY in patients without a specific genetic mutation (KRAS) that renders the drug ineffective. That knowledge comes from understanding cancer genomics which requires a lot of statistics and computational analysis. I'm not saying FAH is a dramatic world-changing part of this progress but it's clear that there is a LOT we don't know and finding cures for many diseases is going to take a lot of incremental progress that doesn't yield anything obvious immediately.
- nitrogen 7y ago"Doing something" can be worse than doing nothing. OP may be posting with an agenda, but onlookers on the fence about running up their electric bill will actually want to know that it's for some real benefit and not a counterproductive show of solidarity (displays of solidarity do have their place, don't get me wrong).
- burntoutfire 7y agoStill, would be nice to be able to point to some tangible result, such as "knowledge obtained eventually led to developing of better treatment for bone cancer" etc.
- Mirioron 7y agoDoesn't even have to be that. It would even be interesting to know what has been figured out based on the folding even if it hasn't led to any improvements in medical treatments.
- an_ko 7y agoAttempting to turn this more constructive: How would you define "actual" progress? None of the results linked above are immediate disease cures, but that's normal. Most research is an unsexy sequence of small increments of progress.
- ramraj07 7y agoDuring my decade long stint working in labs that worked more closer to actual therapies, I've never once referred to a mol.dyn paper or needed those results. Crystallography, sure. Super useful. Mol Dynamics or folding experiments not exactly. Which is fine for basic science, I'm sure there's a possibility some of these folding experiments will lead to insights of actual use in the long-term. However folding@home et al disingenuously portray this immediate effect on curing aids or the latest scare, which I doubt is truly that useful. I'd argue that this simulation research is as useful for covid19 therapeutic research as banning plastic straws is to solve global warming.
- l33tman 7y agoI know this is usually the case (having worked a few years with molecular dynamics) but would be really interesting to get your opinion on what could be done better, where the bottlenecks are (tools or knowledge or just CPU-power) etc. Would you mind sharing some thoughts here or get in touch for some chatting?
- ramraj07 7y agoDisclaimer - I probably did work somewhat far from protein folding research, but still could be considered a "potential consumer" for such research since projects in my lab for example tried to make a therapeutic protein better by structural modification based on structures published by others. I will say that there's nothing wrong with continuing the folding research that's being done. We have a ways to go before purely predicted protein structures (as opposed to structures from crystallography or EM) become trustworthy enough to make research decisions based off of. But we can't get there if we don't continue the basic research! In that sense I'm all for these studies. A lab I always appreciate (purely from perceived merit of the papers I see continuously from) is that of David Baker. They seem to make meaningful strides towards making synthetic protein folding more powerful as a tool among other projects. However what I see as problems are two things in this field: 1. Definitely have seen papers where they'll try to do some molecular Dynamics simulations on some protein related to a disease but it's not clear if it's meaningful to anyone - people actually working on the disease therapy probably weren't even asking for these insights if there were even any; these low-hanging-fruit studies also don't aid the progress of folding and Dynamics research either, because they were just applying standard techniques to a problem domain. Often times these are just cash grabs by researchers who have specialized in the mol.dyn fields and end up writing grants to disease research agencies allegedly in aid of curing the disease but practically not. I know this because my lab did this blatantly. When anthrax was a real threat we got funds for anthrax related research, then we shifted to MS, now cancer. I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly write grants for corona virus related research! This goes on in all these fields. 2. I argue that folding@home keep advertising misleadingly that they're gonna help cure aids or corona or whatever. I don't think they are, not directly. In a very vague way this feels more like war profiteering to me - these experts are exploiting the current fears to canvas their projects (even design them around this) and giving what is closer to false hope than anything that people are contributing towards end goals of curing disease. I feel like they should be honest about it - this is more basic research than anything else, so they should just say they want computational power for basic science. If people still choose to give their resources, great. Otherwise at least you live and die with dignity. Anyways this is of course a rant from a PhD who got sick of the system and left, and someone with only an associative knowledge of this particular field. Hence these thoughts should be taken with a grain of salt!