OMG folding. What a blast from the past. This is possibly the original Virtue Signaling before the term was coined. It was a huge deal with all the leftist gamers who wanted you to do folding with your Playstation when you weren’t playing gamed on it. Folding can cure cancer they said. So if you don’t do folding, your not helping save the world they said.
Virtue Signaling I say.
I disagree. It's valid science. There have been published results from the F@H work. Protein folding is computationally intensive. If someone wants to donate electricity to the project, it's something that can actually contribute to the advancement of science. Folks who participate should understand that it's really not just 'wasted cycles' that are a part of this though. You'll see a measurable increase in electricity consumption from any system running F@H, especially if they are running the GPU cores. Taking part in this is actually costing you money. If you want to do it though, there is nothing wrong with it. I would not go as far as to say that it will "help cure coronavirus" though. They really aren't that specific in the proteins they are working on from what I recall.
Once that was deprecated the Pande Labs had a partnership with Google to run folding in any Chrome browser. That has also deprecated.
While many gamers may well have been virtue signalling, the science is still valid. Here is a link to their 222 published and peer reviewed papers: