I will say that there's nothing wrong with continuing the folding research that's being done. We have a ways to go before purely predicted protein structures (as opposed to structures from crystallography or EM) become trustworthy enough to make research decisions based off of. But we can't get there if we don't continue the basic research! In that sense I'm all for these studies. A lab I always appreciate (purely from perceived merit of the papers I see continuously from) is that of David Baker. They seem to make meaningful strides towards making synthetic protein folding more powerful as a tool among other projects.
However what I see as problems are two things in this field:
1. Definitely have seen papers where they'll try to do some molecular Dynamics simulations on some protein related to a disease but it's not clear if it's meaningful to anyone - people actually working on the disease therapy probably weren't even asking for these insights if there were even any; these low-hanging-fruit studies also don't aid the progress of folding and Dynamics research either, because they were just applying standard techniques to a problem domain. Often times these are just cash grabs by researchers who have specialized in the mol.dyn fields and end up writing grants to disease research agencies allegedly in aid of curing the disease but practically not. I know this because my lab did this blatantly. When anthrax was a real threat we got funds for anthrax related research, then we shifted to MS, now cancer. I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly write grants for corona virus related research! This goes on in all these fields.
2. I argue that folding@home keep advertising misleadingly that they're gonna help cure aids or corona or whatever. I don't think they are, not directly. In a very vague way this feels more like war profiteering to me - these experts are exploiting the current fears to canvas their projects (even design them around this) and giving what is closer to false hope than anything that people are contributing towards end goals of curing disease. I feel like they should be honest about it - this is more basic research than anything else, so they should just say they want computational power for basic science. If people still choose to give their resources, great. Otherwise at least you live and die with dignity.
Anyways this is of course a rant from a PhD who got sick of the system and left, and someone with only an associative knowledge of this particular field. Hence these thoughts should be taken with a grain of salt!
But yeah, the md crowd should have tighter communication with the therapeutics crowd!
BTW just because you switch around your research-targets when funding changes doesn't imply that the research is useless. For example right now there is a lot of money funnelled into corona-research (for obvious reasons).
I do agree it's difficult to formulate how to ask for donations (money or cpu-time), you need to seem optimistic otherwise nobody would do it but research takes a huge amount of money and cpu-time and calendar time so there surely is a gap here between expectations and reality..
And there is a tricky balance between over-promising and under-delivering vs being realistic and lacking enough "flashyness" to get funded/thrown money at.
