MTS58 - David Baker - Crowdsourcing Biology

Meet the Microbiologist

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