Meet the Scientist

MTS58 - David Baker - Crowdsourcing Biology

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Created on Thursday, 23 September 2010 20:17

Written by Carl Zimmer

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.

It turns out that protein folding is a fiendishly hard problem to solve, and even the  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.

Additional Resources:

• Rosetta@Home
• Foldit

Download: mp3 (24 min | 22 megs)