I borrowed this from Nick Bostrom's Letter from Utopia which
I think beautifully expresses the transhumanist world view as I see it.
It has been quite some time since I last posted in this thread, one
of the reasons being that it also has been somewhat quiet
over at Rosetta@home and in David Baker's Journal - which I think means
they are busy getting on with their work, i.e., improving
their protein folding methodology and designing proteins for medical
(HIV vaccine, cancer related, etc.) and other (Carbon sequestration)
applications. Here are some recent developments:
There has been some progress with the Rosetta game which will allow
users to interact with their computer and other players (!) to solve
difficult protein folding problems. The above link is a first prototype
with limited functionality. Also see the related
Rosetta@home
forum
thread.
And just an hour ago David Baker posted this enthusiastic update in the
Rosetta@home journal:
The results of the last few days of computations of Rosetta@home on
your computers have been pretty amazing! In collaboration with a group at the
NIH, we experimented with adding a very small amount of information about
protein structures from nuclear magnetic resonance experiments to the rosetta
structure prediction process. this information is fairly easily obtainable,
and doesn't seem like it would have much effect, but the results show quite
contrary--the models produced are extremely accurate! this has the potential
to revolutionize how scientists determine protein 3D structures using NMR
data. We would never have been able to test the idea, which came up in a phone
conversation several months ago, without all of your contributions.
Today I spoke at the AidsVaccine07 meeting about our work on designing
vaccines. Scientists who have been working on this very challenging problem
for many years are I think excited about our approach as it is something that
hasn't been tried before and makes sense conceptually. While we are still far
from a vaccine, our initial results with collaborators at the NIH are
promising. I spoke to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal after my talk,
and I think she is interested in writing an article on rosetta@home and HIV
vaccine design.
So let's keep on gnawing at those bars by running Rosetta@home on our
computers...
Those who are new to
Rosetta@home
and consider to join
will find lots of interesting material on the Rosetta@home website. Also have
a look at the first post of this thread and follow the links (Simon:
it seems the links to individual forum posts don't work anymore since the
Betterhumans relaunch - they all point to the top of the respective forum
page. Is there a way to fix this on your side ??).
__
Hoelder1in