Game on! - learning to fight real diseases in a virtual world

[xchrom]

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/Game/on/-/learning/to/fight/real/diseases/in/virtual/world/elpepusoc/20110915elpepusoc_22/Tes

Picture a university laboratory where molecular-level research is carried out into biological processes. The laboratories are a hive of activity among samples, test tubes and cell cultures. One laboratory stands out from the others: here too work is performed on molecules and chemical reactions, but there is not a single flask or pipette to be seen. Here there are only computers, and a group of researchers glued to the screens.

These are the members of the Molecular Modelling Group at the 'Severo Ochoa' Centre for Molecular Biology at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Headed by Dr Paulino Gómez-Puertas, the team is made up of David García, Fernando Martín, Dr Jan-Jaap Wesselink, Dr Jesús Mendieta and Dr Eduardo López-Viñas.

The few computers that are on view are not really the ones doing the work. What you can see are just terminals connected to the real calculating machines, housed in a specially acclimatized room at the other end of the campus, a kilometre away. Inside those machines the team is manufacturing an unreal world that is intended to be an image of the actual physical world we live in. They produce virtual nucleic acids and proteins, and provide them with movement thanks to enormously complicated calculations in which the forces that govern the interactions between atoms within the molecules are analysed and simulated. In this overwhelmingly tiny virtual world, distances are measured in millionths of a centimetre while the atoms attract each other, collide and separate at terrifying speeds, over periods that are measured in trillionths of a second. And thanks to the movement of the atoms that make them up, the proteins also come to life. They vibrate and twist; they join up to other proteins; and they take part in chemical reactions. All this is in an effort to simulate, in a universe that does not exist, how all these things really do occur in the cells of a parallel universe?in other words our universe, reality.

[laconicsax]

1. K&R

[HuckleB]

2. Recommended.

[bemildred]

3. Sounds very hard to get right, but with lots of potential.

:thumbsup: