How to help with cancer research using your Mac

On The Cancer Blog today, Leonardo talks about the Human Proteome Folding Project, which allows you, dear reader, to “donate” your idle computer time to a most worthy cause: cancer research.

It’s a cause that hits home for me. My father passed away last spring from cancer, my grandmother had cancer and my mother is currently battling cancer.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with similar grid computing projects. Perhaps you run SETI@Home with hopes that you will be the one to discover human life on another planet. Some of you may even be Folding@Home, perhaps with Team Mac OS X, with hopes of contributing to cures for Alzheimers and other diseases.

Unfortunately, there is still no Mac client that will enable Mac users to participate in projects like this one. There are workarounds, however. True geeks can run the UD (United Devices, the developers of the client software) agent using Darwine on any 10.2.6+ Mac. Or you can run the Windows UD client under Virtual PC. If you are going to run Windows, it might as well be for a worthy cause! For an explanation as to why there is not and most likely won’t be a Mac UD client, see this post in grid.org’s forums.

For more info on the project, visit grid.org.