From New Scientist, info about the United Devices cancer project which turned to fighting anthrax. "A screensaver designed to find promising new drugs for treating anthrax has hit paydirt in just four weeks... "We managed to search the complete dataset in just four weeks instead of years," says Karl Harrison, an IT expert in Oxford's department of chemistry. "Having that big set to start with means we've come up with drug compounds that the pharmaceutical companies would never have thought of," he says."
Though "not everyone in the screensaver user community is happy. That is because 1.2 million of the 1.35 million people who ran the screensaver actually downloaded a program that seeks useful drugs for treating cancer... Some downloaders have been offended by the way their PC was harnessed for use in a project that they did not sanction. Some, who have written to New Scientist expressing their anger, say cancer is a far bigger killer than anthrax, and they wanted their software to continue working on cancer. They were particularly upset that they were not told of the switch over four weeks ago from crunching cancer data to anthrax."
I was definitely one of those people who got angry because of the switch.
Friday, February 22, 2002
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