Want to help cure cancer? AIDS?

The World Community Grid has recently added another weapon to its arsenal: fighting cancer. The Help Defeat Cancer project will analyze scans of cancerous tissue, looking for patterns and markers that will help differentiate the various types of cancer and their signatures. This new project comes only a few weeks after the introduction of the second iteration of the Human Proteome Folding project, which calculates the precise interactions of atoms during protein folding. Proteins are long chains of amino acids that fold in precise physical structures. Analysis of these interactions can help cure myriads of diseases, as all biological processes involve protein synthesis and folding for their operations. The FightAids@Home project has already run an astonishing 22,272 years of computing thanks to the participation of its 200,000 members.

"According to the World Health Organization, cancer causes 7 million deaths each year, or 12.5% of deaths worldwide. More than 11 million people are diagnosed with cancer every year, and it is estimated that there will be 16 million new cases every year by 2020" [Help Defeat Cancer | World Community Grid] while "UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, estimated that in 2004 there were more than 40 million people around the world living with HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus." [FightAIDS@Home | World Community Grid]. The threats of terrorism are a mere shadow when stood against the miniature killers that target us all indiscriminately.

You can personally contribute to helping cure cancer, AIDS and a host of other genetic diseases by contributing your wasted computer resources to calculate the causes of those diseases, a different approach from the traditional pharmaceutical method of trial and error on symptoms. Even your most ambitious personal use of your computer's resources waste the vast majority of its potential. If you were to look at the resources you are using (i.e. your cpu and memory usage), you would find that about 95% of the time your cpu is idle, working at a fraction of its gigahertz capacity.

Downloading and running the World Community Grid agent on every computer on which you can (i.e. yours, your parents', neighbours', at work) can have a much greater impact in saving lives than any other significant effort you, or even the world's governments, will ever undertake. If the WCG's efforts in calculating the causes of diseases would yield a cure for cancer, millions of people would escape death every year. Unlike the billions spent on the "war on terror", this minimal effort on your part will yield genuine impact on the world and, litteraly, save millions of lives.

[Cross-published: Newsvine - Want to help cure cancer? AIDS?]