As one of the authors on the NSMB paper (which you can read for free right now as it was NSMB’s Article of the Month: http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/nsmb.2119) I wanted to address Stephen Curry’s great point that a lot more information about the actual M-PMV protein would have made for a more complete paper.

All those details can be found in this paper (where we paid the open access fees so that anyone can read it for free): http://journals.iucr.org/d/issues/2011/11/00/lv5014/index.html

You can see that the structure of HIV-1 protease DIMER has been known for 23 years now. But there was no accurate structure of retroviral protease in the MONOMERIC form: before the protein actually assembles as an enzymatically competent dimer. The crystal structure that the Foldit players helped solve fills this long-time gap. Hopefully now, with the knowledge of the structure of the M-PMV protease monomeric target, we can prevent dimerization and we’ll have an excellent new avenue to new-generation AIDS drugs. (And obviously we have deposited this result in the publicly-accessible Protein Data Bank, so that anyone can access it: http://www.pdb.org/pdb/explore/explore.do?structureId=3SQF)

I also wanted to point out that (in terms of the players getting proper credit on the Nature Structural and Molecular Biology paper) we actually asked the 3 individual players to be co-authors on the paper but they refused, instead asking for their entire team to get the credit.

You can see ‘mimi’ mentioning this in the cosmiclog piece (https://bitly.com/foldit1): “You may be aware that we asked for accreditation for the Foldit Contenders Team within the article, rather than being named individually.”

We were amazed by this display of camaraderie!

Also, in response to some people saying that the gamers should get more credit or that the gamers seem to be more skilled at solving problems than the scientists in charge, one thing to consider is the fact that someone had to figure out the rules for the game and then create it before the gamers could even touch it. If all it took to be a researcher was to be skilled at solving brightly colored puzzles on a computer screen then it wouldn’t require 4 years of bachelor work and 6 years of PhD work (plus post-doc and all that good stuff). That’s not to say they aren’t skilled, it’s just that there are many many other cogs that make this machine work than the final step of brute forcing solutions.

It is something that needs to be addressed at some point. We live in a society that believes that “value creators” have the right to profit from that, and this type of “game” does seem to be an exploit of that. Perhaps it will need to be addressed with the gamers, not the people exploiting their gaming, but it should be addressed at some point in some way.

Our economic system is already one that favors heavily those who are adept at exploiting the talent, work, and innovation of others, rather than those who are talented, hard working or innovative, and as a species we do need to ask ourselves if its wise to set up systems that favor exploitation over talent.

We are playing the game of natural selection, after all, and clearly, the exploitative are “winning” on a global scale. Im not sure thats in humanitys best interests in the long run.

We already have that framework in place. It’s called “Capitalism”.

Unfortunately, the players in another group called “Government” has imposed so many restrictions, taxes and other disincentives on the “Capitalism” group that its citizen-wide creative activities have been stifled, with the economy suffering as a direct result.

It doesn’t help that the “Government” group thinks that their function is not to promote the economy, but to support a third group, the “Drones”, whose members believe that they deserve life-long support simply for voting some of their more vocal members into the “Government” group, rather than participating in the “Capitalism” group.