WARNING: SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT!!!!! TPG FOLDERS UNITE!!!!!

**Viktor_Olin** · 06-08-11, 07:48 PM

OK, BFBC2 teamplayers, here's a chance to support a worthy cause with those elite gaming PC's you use for BFBC2. Get over to http://www.teamplayergaming.com/pc-h...ding-team.html and join the team! In less than 2 months the TPG team has gone from one member to 26, and the team has rocketed up the ranks to the top 2000 teams (actually, number 1908 of 201297 teams as of this post; updated stats are at Team 204219's contributions to Folding@home).

Your otherwise idle PC can contribute to research that may find cures for Alzheimer's Disease, Huntington's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, various cancers, etc. The researchers have developed software that can utilize your CPU and most GPU's. Give it a try; it's a friendly, addictive competition among the team members, but the best part is watching the TPG Team's score steadily rise and our ranking improve. Get involved and let's cure some disease!

The preceding was a public service announcement paid for by this station.

**moving-target** · 06-08-11, 08:09 PM

find a cure and the drug companies make billions while they have thousands of computers working for free

**Viktor_Olin** · 06-08-11, 08:36 PM

Originally Posted by moving-target

find a cure and the drug companies make billions while they have thousands of computers working for free

Yeah, I guess you're right, we wouldn't want anyone to make money, even if it means a cure for all those horrible diseases, would we?

Feel free to ignore this thread then, target. Please.

**moving-target** · 06-09-11, 09:38 AM

what you dont realize people wont be able to afford the cure cause ifi ts for something as major as cancer forget about it for example plavix a friggen blood thinner is 200$ + a bottle and thats just a friggen blood thinner imagine something that would cure something like aids /cancer

**bryn0202** · 06-09-11, 06:03 PM

Just for interest sake (summarized from Wikipedia)

For the top 20 pharmaceutical compani9es in the world

Average annual revenue $25B
Annual R&D costs $3.5B
Annual net income $5.5B (20% on revenue)

while a fairly high return on revenue, its not completely ripping off the consumer.

The above does not account for the Billions of R&D costs expended by companies that just never make it.

Its expensive to develop drugs

"Drug companies are like other companies in that they manufacture products that must be sold for a profit in order for the company to survive and grow. They are different from some companies because the drug business is very risky. For instance, only one out of every ten thousand discovered compounds actually becomes an approved drug for sale. Much expense is incurred in the early phases of development of compounds that will not become approved drugs.[4] In addition, it takes about 7 to 10 years and only 3 out of every 20 approved drugs bring in sufficient revenue to cover their developmental costs, and only 1 out of every 3 approved drugs generates enough money to cover the development costs of previous failures. This means that for a drug company to survive, it needs to discover a blockbuster (billion-dollar drug) every few years"

**Viktor_Olin** · 06-09-11, 07:48 PM

This is from Folding@Home's Executive Summary:

Who "owns" the results? What will happen to them?

Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution
(specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit
institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money
off of it. Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from
Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations
will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the
web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data,
the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on
this web site.

So, the argument that the evil "Drug Companies" stand to profit from this research is a straw man argument. Drug companies may, ultimately, benefit from this research, but not directly, and not before using the freely available data to possibly develop a pharmaceutical that may have a therapeutic benefit.

So, support the project, or don't, on the merits of the research itself. But to demonize the research because a hypothetical pharmaceutical company might one day make a profit from the research is ludicrous.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

**[CoFR]SirMoo** · 06-10-11, 02:18 AM

I refuse to take part in F@H because it is not open source; also all of my own computer time is used for my own computational chemistry calculations I have to do for my own day job (at my university