Folding Proteins at Home

In what is rapidly becoming a new world of democratic computing, Noah Johnson’s three Power Macs are humming quietly away, helping Stanford University scientists solve a complex problem that, one day, may help them fight disease.

As part of a groundbreaking distributed computing experiment, Johnson and half a million other people are donating their spare computer capacity so Stanford can remotely simulate protein folding, an essential biochemical process that controls vital body functions.

The project, called Folding@home, represents a sort of ad hoc democracy because anyone with an Internet connection can join. Users simply download an application that runs protein-folding simulations on their desktop computers when the systems are idle.