Many readers will have heard of Rosetta@Home. It's a
distributed-computing approach to protein folding problems,
which is certainly an area that can absorb all the floating-
point operations you can throw at it. It's run from David
Baker's lab at the University of Washington, and has users all
over the world contributing. A reader sends along news that
recently the project seems to have come across a good hit in one
of their areas, proteins designed to bind to the surface of
influenza viruses. It looks like they have one with tight
binding to an area of the virus associated with cell entry, so
the next step will be to see if this actually prevents viral
infection in a cell assay. At that point, though, I have to step
in as a medicinal chemist and ask what the next step after that
could be. It won't be easy to turn that into any sort of
therapy, as Prof. Baker makes clear himself: Being able to
rapidly design proteins which bind to and neutralize viruses and
other pathogens would definitely be a significant ste