MTS58 - David Baker - Crowdsourcing Biology

Published: Sept. 23, 2010, 10 a.m.

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In this podcast I spoke to David Baker, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington. Baker and his colleagues study how proteins fold, taking on the complex shapes that make our lives possible.

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It turns out that protein folding is a fiendishly hard problem to solve, and even the\\xa0 most sophisticated computers do a poor job of solving it. So Baker and his colleagues have enlisted tens of thousands of people to play a protein-folding game called Foldit. I talked to David Baker about the discoveries they\'ve made through crowdsourcing, and the challenges of getting 57,000 co-authors listed on a paper.

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Additional Resources:

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Rosetta@Home

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Foldit

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