Almost exactly a decade ago, Charity Engine began donating computing power to Rosetta@home, a brilliant 'citizen science' project run by David Baker at the University of Washington's Institute of Protein Design: 

https://www.ipd.uw.edu/news-pages/the-power-of-charity-for-protein-design/ 

Proteins are the building blocks of all life. Understanding how they work, specifically how they fold, has been the holy grail of medicine for decades - but the process demands vast computing power. 

Fortunately, that computing power now exists. To date, our members have provided 1.5 BILLION compute hours of computing to science, with over 200 million hours of that to Rosetta: https://www.charityengine.com/grants

Was it worth it?

Emphatically yes. Not only has Rosetta enabled genuine medical breakthroughs, it even helped design a Covid vaccine from scratch. And now, in recognition for his pioneering research, David Baker has just won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, along with two other leading lights in the field of computational protein design.

So if you've had Charity Engine quietly running Rosetta in the background on your PC, you have literally helped some of the most important medical research ever. 

Huge congratulations to David and all his colleagues. We couldn't be more proud!

Wow, that took a while to validate! The winning entry is 13301142, owned by User 0117. Congratulations to Adam R, who is now a two-time winner!

Some users have a lot more computing power than others, and so are that much more likely to win the draws. Although this is to be expected, we are looking at how we can level the paying field a bit for the smaller users so that multiple winners become less likely.  

Update to follow!