Do you have cancer? If not, stick around; eventually, you will. That's what doctors say: If you live long enough, sooner or later you'll come down with some form of cancer.

For a long-time friend of mine, it was sooner. He's about 47, a successful businessman with a new wife and a couple kids. Bad time to find out that he's got myeloma, an incurable cancer of the blood plasma cells.

That's how such diseases are described in mushy human terms, but to a molecular biologist, cancer is a lot like a bug in a super complex computer program, one whose code is written in molecules like DNA, RNA and countless proteins. That means the cure to every cancer or disease that you and I will ever suffer is really just a solution to a very complicated problem in geometry.

Thus, molecular modeling. Using computer algorithms, researchers construct "candidate" molecules to see which ones best fit into binding sites on a target molecule. Problem is, there are so many possible candidates that it's practically impossible to calculate all of them without massive computing power, which sometimes can be done by buying a supercomputer, but otherwise can be accomplished by combining the processing power of many average computers, like yours and mine.

America is a country where literally millions of computers sit idle for most of the day, like cars parked at a stop light with the engine running, using 25 to 65 Watts of electricity for absolutely no reason. All those millions of computers could be churning out solutions to enormous problems, from better climate predictions to cures for diseases.

Why isn't that happening? Well, one reason is that you and I haven't taken the first little step.

I just installed a collaborative computing program on my PC called BOINC. You download the software, install it, then pick a project. It may increase your electric bill by a few cents a month.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

There is no reason that every blogger on the internet (politics doesn't matter - cancer doesn't care) can't be running BOINC on their computers at home. The Rosetta Stone project is a good example of today's state of the art in molecular modeling research using computing time donated by folks like you and me. I have Rosetta Stone running on my computer right now, and I will leave it running from now on.

I like to think of it this way: We know that eventually cures will be found for most, if not all diseases, including myeloma. Suppose that with today's computing resources it takes 100 months from now (~8 years) to find a the magic bullet molecule to cure myeloma (or some other disease). That means if you could find a way to double the computing resources, you might cut in half the time needed to find that magic bullet. Multiply that processing power by ten, and we might start seeing cures in a couple years!

I hope you can see where I'm going with this. Extend that same idea in more directions. Suppose collaborative computing becomes integrated into the next version of Windows and Apple's OS and the Linux kernel. Suppose it becomes a bipartisan political issue, and bloggers start pressuring candidates and our representatives to push for this idea harder. Suppose we start letting these blasted machines do something useful in all their spare time?

It does not seem unreasonable to try to save your friends, family and yourself from deadly diseases.

Please give collaborative computing a try. If it screws up your computer, you can always uninstall it. Meanwhile, you may help to find a cure for a disease that could one day kill somebody you love. Including yourself.