![]() "That's the way it is and that's the way it's going to be."ĭeSorbo's not much of a video gamer by nature - although, to her credit, she did try out the uber-addictive fantasy World of Warcraft for about a week at her son's behest.īut she's always loved puzzles and she's become one of Foldit's top 20 players. "They're all orange and blue thingies to me," laughs Doreen DeSorbo, a semi-retired 61-year-old living in Rhode Island, referring to the game's puzzle pieces. Not that all of them have a full grasp on the finer points of the discovery. And they deciphered the structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus - which had stumped scientists for 15 years - in just 10 days. Instead of RNA, they focus on protein molecules. Players of Foldit, the game from which EteRNA emerged, did that just last year. It's one of those increasingly common spaces in which gaming meets real life, challenging any stereotype you might have of video game enthusiasts with tired eyes and Cheetos-stained fingers zoning out in front of a monitor while gunning down mutant aliens.įor example, how about cracking the code on an AIDS-related virus that had stumped scientists for well over a decade? And that's surprised even him.ĮteRNA is one of a small but growing cadre of games that seek to deploy video gamers - virtually none of whom have backgrounds in the sciences - to help solve riddles that could lead to major medical breakthroughs. The game has become a digital breeding ground for a stable of citizen scientists as apt to publish their findings in a scientific journal as they are to share a virtual high-five over a high score. He's the co-creator of EteRNA, an online video game in which players solve puzzles that also happen to mimic the way strands of the stuff will behave in nature. Now, as an assistant professor of biochemistry at Stanford University, he's married that childhood streak of gamer curiosity with his work investigating RNA, the tiny molecules essential to life and central in the hunt for cures to diseases like cancer and AIDS.
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