Scientists want your PCs to fight smallpox

[bobbi]

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- It's the ultimate needle-in-the-haystack search, but a coalition of scientists and technology companies think they may be able to make headway on a cure for smallpox using computer screen savers.

Their project aims to use the idle processing power of up to 2 million personal computers to sift through millions of molecular combinations in hopes of finding one that fights smallpox after infection.

Though smallpox vaccinations exist, there is no known cure to the disease once a person is infected.

Volunteers download a screen saver from www.grid.org that runs whenever their computers have resources to spare to perform computations for the project. When the user connects to the Internet, the computer sends data back to a central hub and gets another assignment.

Read full story here:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/02/05/computers.smallpox.ap/index.html

I find this a little bit fishy myself

 

[pistol]

This is actually more common than you might think. Scientists have been doing the same thing with other deseases including HIV and ebola for quite a few years now.