VOLUNTEERING: When Lauren Moran isn't typing on her laptop, it's busy with heavy-duty computations for medical research projects. | Photograph by Joao Canziani

AT GRID HQ: "We're opening up the field of bioinformatics," says IBM VP Robin Willner.
Photograph by Reed Young

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For the past four years, Lauren Moran has devoted herself to groundbreaking cancer research, chronicling the fickle interaction between molecules and proteins. Despite having a full-time job -- "stat geek" on the New York Yankees' media relations staff -- Moran screens drug candidates daily. And continuously. She conducts experiments while talking on the phone to her parents, attending games at Yankee Stadium, and watching episodes of The Office in her Bronx apartment. Even in the dead of night.

When she's not trying to cure cancer, she's busy cracking other monumental problems: AIDS. World hunger. Clean energy. It's a breathtaking portfolio for a 24-year-old communications major who didn't take a single chemistry or biology class in college.

Moran is a new breed of innovator: a citizen researcher on IBM's World Community Grid (WCG), an unprecedented effort to deploy ordinary people's idle computers to create a free, open-source lab for researchers around the globe. Massive computational research is broken down into discrete problems and distributed across a vast network. Since the tech giant launched the nearly $2-million-a-year project in November 2004, more than half a million people in 218 countries have volunteered some 1.5 million laptops and desktops. In raw computing power, the grid is comparable to a top-10 supercomputer. The average PC would take more than 328,000 years to complete the grid's calculations so far.

The grid, says researcher Alán Aspuru-Guzik, an assistant professor of chemistry at Harvard, "gives you the opportunity to do something nobody else has done. Something disruptive."

Moran's laptop displays a screen saver of her latest WCG assignment, but the science, she admits, is "way over my head. I just know when I'm not using my computer, it's crunching numbers that could lead to a cure."


 Most of us use our computers about as efficiently as we use our brains: We scratch the surface, never tapping the full potential. WCG exploits this unused computing power by borrowing -- with the owner's permission -- a machine's central processing unit to do some serious math. It works unobtrusively, when you aren't working. You download software that takes advantage of any break, from a phone call to a pause while you're thinking of what to type next. The instant your fingers touch the keys, the calculations cease.

 At IBM, a full-time staff of seven -- dispersed across the country, from Beaverton, Oregon, to Austin -- makes sure that the projects' individual applications are running smoothly, that the grid is assigning work and returning results to the appropriate lab, that problems aren't cropping up in the online member forums, and that software for upcoming projects is being vetted.

Using this powerful new tool, AIDS researchers at Scripps Research Institute are generating new drug leads to combat the growing strains of drug-resistant HIV. French scientists are learning more about the proteins behind muscular dystrophy. (Partly because of that project, the lead researcher, Alessandra Carbone, was recently named the "Woman Scientist of the Year" by the French government.) Scientists at the University of Washington are compiling a comprehensive map of rice proteins, which could help developing countries grow more nutritious, higher-yield crops. A team led by the Cancer Institute of New Jersey used the grid to develop algorithms that identify subtle signatures in digitized cancer tissues that could lead to early, accurate, and rapid detection; the results convinced the National Institutes of Health to award the team $2.5 million to expand the database.

WCG, which hosted one project its first year, now runs a half dozen or more simultaneously. The latest: In hopes of discovering new organic electronic materials that could lead to cheaper solar cells, Aspuru-Guzik is screening about 2 million chemical compounds for photovoltaic properties. That's roughly 20,000 times more compounds than he could analyze on a single computer. And the project will take only a couple of years, instead of two decades.

"We're opening up the field of bioinformatics," says Robin Willner, IBM's vice president of global community initiatives, including WCG.

"There's nothing else out there like this."

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For her senior project at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, Moran went door-to-door, installing the WCG program. She and her classmates persuaded the college president to send a campus-wide email encouraging participation. The campaign slogan: "When doing nothing is doing something." It wasn't a tough sell. "I think everybody would like to do more volunteer work, but they don't have the time," Moran says. "This is easy, even for the busiest people."