It's a trade off. Some want more "progress". Others want "something new". If you are running too many projects at once, the progress on each will be slower.

Like others, I think that Cancer will attract lots of new members because of the perceived worthiness of that kind of project. I'm pushing the existing workunits out as fast as I can to both finish them sooner and see something new sooner.

That brings up a classic situation. If I apply for a job and hear nothing, the lack of information makes me figure I didn't get it. Most companies only send out a progress notice to the one successful candidate.

Hi rbolo28,

I asked the same question some time ago. You might like to look at the response here:

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=5471#43988

Cheers

This grid crunching is only the first PRELIMINARY phase to what the researchers could hope to accomplish in the real world. We are SCREENING drugs to find promising candidates and folding proteins to analyze their structure. The researchers have to compile the findings at the conclusion of the project and write any research papers and publications in future phases. Some of that might even call for some recrunching, as in Rosetta phase II.

"Mr. Edison, have you invented the light bulb yet?"

"I don't know, son. It's still pretty dark around here. I have a few thousand other filament combinations to try first."

And then, there's the power plants, dynamos, distribution system, transformers, appliances, watt-hour meters, motors and even electric bills. Sorry, I have to get back to work on that light bulb. There later turned out to be 25 designs for light bulb bases and many patent disputes over 13 years until the Edison socket won out.

What we do here is basic science. Universities and research labs with projects requiring a lot of computing power come to the WCG, and we crunchers do the hard work. Note that the big pharmaceuticals can go and buy their own supercomputers - WCG have strict entry requirements.

So, the lab will have designed an experiment, written the code, and created the input data. We do the crunching. The lab gets back the results. They analyse the results, in the context of their experiment. They write a paper. Probably several papers (these are big experiments we're doing here). This takes time. They will publish in peer reviewed journals, present their findings at international conferences, all that jazz. The HPF project has just started publishing now, after a couple of years of crunching. But now they've started, we can expect to see more papers coming out, since they are still getting new data all the time.

If you are interested, there are previous papers available published by the FAAH lab and the HPF lab, which give a lot of the context for these projects.

What happens to the published research after that depends on the project. FAAH are searching for candidate drugs. Their findings will go through several phases of testing and trials, hopefully ending in successful human testing. This process takes a fair few years, as well. It is likely that the later phases will be undertaken by other labs and drugs companies.

The HPF results are slightly different. They are going to be useful in all sorts of other research projects. The predicted structures may well be used in future crunching projects, to find drugs for specific diseases.

Protein misfolding is an entirely different problem, and is being worked on by a different project.

So, what difference have we made in the real world? Well, so far some scientists know a lot more than they did, and the FAAH scientists have already found some good leads for further testing.