In this podcast I spoke toDavid 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 calledFoldit. 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@HomeFoldit
At Meet the Scientist, we want to reveal more about scientists, the work they do, and what makes them tick. We?ll ask them what they?re up to now and what?s next. How is the science moving forward to solve some of the intractable problems of our times? What keeps them going in a tough, competitive field? What do they see for the future of research, education, and training? We hope to show you a glimpse of what scientists are really like and what?s going on in cutting-edge research today.