Art curing cancer

On Saturday, I went to the graduation ceremony at Art Center College of Design, and was floored by something that one of the speakers said.

Kevin Mack, a visual effects supervisor for Sony, mentioned the work he did several years ago for the movie “Fight Club.” He had created a program that used a few specific rules to grow an organic, branching pattern, used in the movie for an image of the human brain.

Later, he was approached by some medical experts who were interested in his program. After sitting on their medical board, he advised the experts on the creation of a similar program used to predict cell behavior.

The program is now used by many doctors to test drugs and various treatments for illnesses.

Kevin said, many parents wish their children to become doctors; rarely do they wish them to become artists. But wouldn’t it be ironic if it was art that cured cancer?

On kind of a side note, after mentioning Kevin’s story to a friend, I was told to look into something called Folding@Home.

It turns out that it is another behavior program, but it run on thousands of computers owned by people across the world. The collective power of these computers shortens calculation time, since proteins fold as quickly as one-millionth of a second (see “Why is protein folding so difficult to understand?” here).

The program is downloadable for PCs and Macs, and now even the Playstation 3!