Wouldn’t it be great if merely playing video games could
cure Cancer, AIDS, or even Lyme Disease?
That is exactly what the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science and the Department of Biochemistry had in mind. Adrien Treuille, an avid game inventor lent his expertise to Rhiju Das, a biochemist that needed help solving protein puzzles to help cure diseases. Treuille’s and Das’ intellectual collaboration created the ever growing in popularity online game, ‘Foldit’.
That is exactly what the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science and the Department of Biochemistry had in mind. Adrien Treuille, an avid game inventor lent his expertise to Rhiju Das, a biochemist that needed help solving protein puzzles to help cure diseases. Treuille’s and Das’ intellectual collaboration created the ever growing in popularity online game, ‘Foldit’.
Where computers were not the elite problem solvers for protein folding Treuille used crowd sourcing to recruit gamers to find the answers they needed. The player’s ability to predict possible patterns in the proteins was something that no computer had yet accomplished. The games goal is to optimize protein prediction and eventually use protein folding strategies that the players discovered to create protein prediction software. Another advantage and anticipated goal of the game is figuring out the structures of infectious bacteria proteins and creating new proteins that may be able to kill virus and other harmful proteins.
Could this video game be the answer to finding cures for the most plaguing diseases? It may not rid the world of all its sickness and problems but the game has already had success in the science lab. The Mason-Pfizer monkey virus had stumped scientist for 15 years and the Foldit community figured out the protein structure in just 10 days. So I think there is hope to be had here.
Want to play? But science isn’t your forte? Don’t worry;
you don’t have to be a science nerd in order to get the game. Think of it as
the Rubik Cube with the addiction rate of Angry Birds! Newbie players have beginner
puzzles to solve that show you the rules and how to optimize your score. Once
you have mastered that level you will be hooked and anxious to twist and turn
the more complex proteins.
So if your mom yells at you for playing video games or you
feel ashamed for using video games to procrastinate just play Foldit then you
can declare you aren’t simply playing video games, you could be curing
Cancer... and hopefully one day Lyme Disease!
CLICK here to play Foldit: http://fold.it/portal/
