Hello again rbolo,

The most impressive benefits gained by current RNAi research involve the type of discoveries in that article. RNAi is incredibly useful for discovering new targets and for understanding how different targets affect each other (that is, for understanding how decreases in the amount of a certain target affect the rest of a cell).

Best wishes,
Dr. Alex Perryman

Hello Nemezis,
The Scripps Research Institute uses our computers for many experiments to fight AIDS. If you click on http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu/ you will see that they are ready to run Experiment 17 'Relaxed Complex Method of Several Compounds, Their Fragments & Several Derivatives versus the Exo site of snapshots from MD of V82F/I84V Mutant 1D4S'.

So there is no definite end as long as we have new ideas about how to fight AIDS. At the top of http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu/ you can see links to 4 issues of the FightAIDS@Home Newsletter.

Lawrence

There are no drug companies involved, OnTheEsplanade. All the research done with the help of World Community Grid is released into the public domain. This means that anybody can benefit from the work, and build on it.

IBM run World Community Grid. Have a look at the people on the Advisory Board, overseeing what World Community Grid does:

# Dr. Francine Berman, Director, San Diego Supercomputer Center
# Dr. Paulo Marchiori Buss, President, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz
# Dr. Jim Chelikosky, Director, Center for Computational Materials, Director, Institute for the Theory of Advanced Materials in Information Technology, University of Texas at Austin
# Dr. Denis Cortese, President & CEO, Mayo Clinic
# Dr. Deborah Estrin, Jon Postel Chair in Computer Networks, UCLA; Director, Center for Embedded Networked Sensing
# Mr. John Fahey, President and CEO, National Geographic Society
# Mr. Jonathan Fanton, President, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
# Dr. Gary J. Foley, Director, National Exposure Research Laboratory, Office of Research and Development, United States Environmental Protection Agency
# Dr. Ian Foster, Associate Director, Mathematics & Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory
# Dr. Elaine K. Gallin, Program Director, Medical Research, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
# Professor Paul Jeffreys, Director of Oxford e-Science Centre and Director of Computing Services, Oxford University
# Dr. Sangtae Kim*, Donald W. Feddersen Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University
# Dr. Edward McCabe, Physician-in-Chief, Mattel Children's Hospital, UCLA
# Dr. Ayoade M.J. Oduola*, Coordinator of Basic and Strategic Research and Manager, Committee on Pathogenesis and Applied Genomics, World Health Organization
# Dr. Harry Orf, VP Scientific Operations, Scripps Research Institute
# Dr. Vijay Raghavan, Director, National Center for Biological Sciences
# Ms. Linda Sanford, Senior Vice President of Enterprise On Demand Transformation and Information Technology, IBM Corporation
# Dr. Satoshi Sekiguchi, Director, Grid Technology Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
# Dr. Sibusiso Sibisi, President and CEO, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
# Professor Lap-Chee Tsui, Vice-Chancellor, The University of Hong Kong

Biomedical Research Advisor:
# Dr. T.J. Koerner, Director of Research Information Management, American Cancer Society

You are partly right. There is nothing stopping companies from building on these results, and creating drugs that they can sell. And that's the way it should be. Human trials are very expensive, and drug companies have the resources for that kind of thing.

But with the basic science released to the public domain, there is a lot less that the drug companies can patent (and grounds for throwing out the patents if they try anyway). This means that it is easy to create cheap generic drugs if any of the leads prove successful.

Who has the resources? There are a lot of not-for-profits involved in drug research. Manufacturing drugs isn't the problem - drugs cost mere pennies to actually produce.

Actually, perfectly natural fruit and vegetables can be owned - most countries have special intellectual property law just to protect oddities like hybrid vegetable strains.

To use your analogy - Red Hat charge for Linux*. Does this make the Linux distributions you can get elsewhere any worse? Actually, I hear many are better than Red Hat.

* I'm just going to go with your analogy without getting bogged down in technicalities.

Sorry, OnTheEsplanade. Most of the projects we run here won't have a "magic work unit" containing the cure to cancer or AIDS. Taking FAAH as an example, by the time the scientists are confident they have an exceptional lead, the molecule will have been used in many simulations run by many members.

Besides, I don't believe WCG keep the data that would be needed to track back to the specific members that worked on a particular work unit.

We all share the fame, here.