"feet1st" <nomail@nomail> wrote in message
news:web.49b69f4de57dbb08a45f86ff0@news.povray.org...

> Your comments seem to be guiding others away from participating in such
> projects. And yet, to me, seem like they are probably similar to many
people
> out there. So, I wanted to show you the "devil's advocate" from the other
side
> of the issue.

I'll take the challenge then.

> If you feel curing cancer, and feeding the world are not "good ideas"...
then
> you're right. Humanity isn't worth working to improve. So, stop trying to
do
> your part by dismissing the efforts of those that are.

They are good "goals", but I am in no way qualified to ascertain whether
these researches have any merit in achieving those goals. I'd rather trust
universities, government, and yes, the industry, to chose which leads are
promising. Say what you want about the industry, but there's big money in
curing high profile diseases like cancer, or in agricultural research. Maybe
research about extremely rare diseases can benefit from community support,
but then again, government is in a better position there too, to make sure
not everything is done according to the wishes of the majority or by the
number game alone.

> >Don't get me wrong, I'm just
> > being the devil's advocate here, but you see that it's not enough to
have
> > good intentions. I see a lot of volunteer effort with good intentions
wasted
> > on bad projects already. This is also where compensation comes in handy,
> > because you know that researchers willing and able to compensate are on
to
> > something and not just attempting to use the "grid" just because they
can.

> So, you would feel better about it if Pfizer or Merck were behind the
project?
> And they were willing to pay you $10 a month for your help? ...I don't see
how
> you are doing to get them to agree to both pay you, and release the
results to
> the public. If you see that happen, you *KNOW* the drugs are going to be
priced
> accordingly. The money they spend comes from somewhere.

Drugs will be priced "accordingly" (i.e. outrageously) no matter what. Doing
a few simulations on a distributed grid won't mean that only Pfizer and
Merck will be able to run with it and pass FDA tests... etc. I'm most
certain that the cost of the end product will be hugely insensitive to
whether a community grid or a supercomputer was used in one small phase of
the R&D.

> You also find that where there is money, there is corruption. And people
will
> devise ways to falsify the results they send back to the researchers.
Trying to
> fake having spent a month of computing time to get the $10, and contribute
> nothing but garbage. Keeping the system free of these incentives helps
reduce
> the incentives to do such distructive things.

If there already are not failsafes built in to prevent accidental or
intentional "garbage out", they are doing this grid computing thing terribly
wrong. Often, it's the case that the cost function is asymmetrical, i.e. it
may take 20 CPU years to find a solution, a millisecond to verify it. And
those are the type of problems most suitable for distributed computing
anyway.

> > (*) Yes, I know that people invest in ventures as well, without any
> > immediate benefits provided. But in that case, there's a contract on
> > potential benefits/dividends.

> The "contract", on the website, says the results are made public. That's a
tough
> contract to write. Here, you don't understand proteome folding, but the
people
> that do will do all the work for you, and then give away their results,
good or
> bad, for everyone to use. That doesn't sound at all to me like the last
drug
> commercial I saw on TV.

Research results are already "given out" for free (or the cost of a journal
subscription at most). It's the end results that matter. You or I won't be
able to produce our own drugs based on a research paper. No matter if that
paper is written at zero cost to researchers or at thousands of dollars, the
cost of that information will be same (like I said, cost of a magazine
subscription at most). So don't expect cheaper drugs just because a tiny
part of the initial research phase was cheap.

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