Before I finally deliver on my promise to post weekly installments on the progress of actual research, I should clear up a couple of things. First, I will respond to the concern foremost in the minds of my followers: "Veit [faɪt], you have to be nuts to enter the protein folding fray, what with your modest means and questionable credentials. How can you, a physicist working alone, hope to compete with those well appointed protein folding empires, some of which partner with Google and [awaiting confirmation] even provide private bathrooms to their postdocs?"

True, this has crossed my mind, but it's something I don't lose sleep over. First of all, we are not developing nuclear fusion reactors here, or trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis. For what I have in mind, access to the protein data bank (PDB) and a laptop are all the resources I'll need. And while a Jedi-Knight level of training is appropriate when working on the Riemann hypothesis, in this folding project I'm an opportunist with far less noble motives. 

I see the problem of predicting the folded structures of simple globular proteins as fundamentally an engineering challenge. We already understand the science. Of course there is a free energy funnel, that guides the condensation of these bio-polymers. What's lacking is that handy smart-phone app, where you type in an amino acid code (the primary sequence) and it displays the 3D structure (a ribbon diagram). Am I crazy to think such a thing is possible?

My dad developed hard drives for IBM. Over the course of his career he managed to shrink their size from car tires to dimes. Thank him the next time you walk around with your laptop and it doesn't start precessing like a gyroscope. My protein folding project is similar: it's not big science, just cool engineering. There's no Nobel Prize in my future, even if I succeed, although I'm not ruling out a couple of paragraphs in the newspaper science section. If it's picked up in the UK, the headline might read:

         US Boffins Fold Protein With Sudoku Formula

But if you insist that I conjure up at least one nemesis to add an epic dimension to my project, it would take the form of a tornado on the horizon, a dark funnel with forks of lightning. That's because it might very well turn out that the only good algorithm for folding is the one Nature uses, where random coils are sluiced down a free energy funnel and emerge as compact, functional molecules. And if that's the case, then the best we can do with our computers is to consign them to lives of servitude at folding@home. Now that's what keeps me up at night.