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CNN Sunday Morning
Screen Saver Fights Cancer
Aired April 15, 2001 - 09:45 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Here are a few troubling statistics: Over the past 10 years, 13 million people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with cancer and, in fact, a person dies every minute in this country of the disease. Now, do you want to help find a cure for cancer? It might be as easy as turning to your home computer.
Joining us from Tucson to explain this is Dr. Sujuan Ba.
Dr. Ba, welcome to our program, good to have you with us.
And why don't we come back here and I'll show you what we've got running here. We've had this screen saver running all night here on our smart board computer, and this screen saver is doing more than protecting the screen. Dr. Ba, what is it actually doing? This is a program that allows your effort to use the computing power of this machine and others; explain it.
DR. SUJUAN BA, FOUNDATION FOR CANCER RESEARCH: Absolutely. This is about saving people's lives. This is about turning your screen saver into a life saver. So we've distributed computing technology pioneered by United Devices and Intel. You can actually, for the first time in the cancer research history, to join the scientists at the National Foundation for Cancer Research to cure cancer.
You can actually -- turning all those PCs that you own into virtual supercomputers to help the scientists to identify the molecules that could be potential cures for cancers.
O'BRIEN: So in a sense you're creating sort of the ultimate liked, kind of parallel supercomputer her in an effort to crunch a lot of numbers.
Let's go back to this screen here for just a moment. We -- as I say, we've been running this now for just under a full day. It says we -- our total CPU time, which mean Central Processing Unit, is 23 hours nine minutes and 27 seconds. And then it says: task execution progress and it says 65 percent. Now, Dr. Ba, 65 percent of what? What does that mean?
BA: When you log on to Internet, and after you download the UD Agent, the software to run this screen saver and you receive 100 molecules in a package. And so your computer is running the calculations, so tight now they're about 60 percent of your calculations finished. And so once they finish, you log on to the Internet; it will send back to the central servers and you will get new information to do the calculation.
O'BRIEN: And precisely how will this help researchers? What sorts of computations is the computer doing that might help researchers as they try to find a cure?
BA: With this virtual supercomputer the scientists can screen more than 250 million small molecules against the known protein targets to find those molecules that have toxic interactions with the proteins, and those will be the hits for potential drug candidates.
O'BRIEN: All right Dr. Ba, I am a little bit familiar with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence -- a similar program. Is that where you all got this idea, or is this something that happened separately?
BA: Yes, actually it's using the same technology platform. United Devices -- the chief scientific officer who developed the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) technology.
O'BRIEN: All right, Dr. Sujuan Ba, who is with the National Foundation for Cancer Research -- once again we're back on our screen saver her. We're doing our part here to hopefully help find a cure for cancer. And if you are interested in downloading this and becoming a part of this program we invite you to check out www.ud.com and they'll walk you through the process of downloading it. It took us probably no more than 20 minutes yesterday -- a little bit of tweaking and we got it up and running on this computer.
Dr. Ba, thanks for being with us on CNN SUNDAY MORNING; good luck.
BA: Thank you very much.
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