[MaxBarraclough]

There was a recent HN discussion on whether this kind of approach has ever produced an effective treatment for anything. I believe the answer was Never, but lots of papers have been published.

Assuming that's the case, I don't put much stock in this giving us a means of fighting the pandemic.

[plopilop]

Well science goes frutstratingly slowly, especially in these fields. According to wikipedia the project has helped in 118 papers.

The idea of the single scientist singlehandedly solving everything is mostly a myth. Most of the time, people rely on hundreds of previous papers before making their own contribution. Taken together, all the minimal steps make a significant leap.

Folding@home can very well be part of this effort.

[ac29]

No, its unlikely to help produce an effective treatment, at least not in a useful timeframe.

If you're considering spending a dollar or two a day on electricity to contribute to the F@H project, consider donating that amount instead. Charity Navigator has a good list of well regarded charities that are working on covid-19 response: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&...

[fuckknows]

That's science though. You have to just try and learn as much as you can, from as many different directions as possible, because we have no idea which approach will lead to useful discoveries until it does.

[pradn]

This is a rather cynical take. It's hard to know the results of basic research on future therapies. Is it likely that this one project is going to find the smoking gun cure when there's hundreds of teams around the world trying all sorts of alternative approaches for medication and vaccines? No. But is this contributing to the sum of human knowledge about the virus? Yes.