A lengthy discourse on Alzheimer's disease certainly isn't needed. There are scads of resources on the Internet, all one need do is Google on "Alzheimer's". Suffice to say however that watching my father lose his memory and his mental faculties was a terribly sad experience. To have one's critical thinking and memories washed away - I can only imagine what it felt like for my father.

I am faced however, rather than imagining, with experiencing this same reality as my father did, probably in as little as twenty or thirty years, unless a cure for Alzheimer's is found. Obviously, millions of others are faced with this dark future; perhaps you as well.

But a truly remarkable potential is available: you, dear reader, have the capacity to actually contribute to the research for a cure, with virtually no expenditure of effort -- or even money. All you need do is install a very special, tiny, program on your home computer. Through "Distributed Computing", anybody with a home computer can 'lend' some of their computer's power to this effort, quite painlessly.

Stanford University's "Folding At Home" program runs in the background on your computer, assisting in the incredibly complex calculations that are required to investigate protein folding, considered a revolutionary path to finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease, and many other diseases. I run the program on my PC, and it sits quietly out of sight, calculating away, never bothering me. I recommend it highly and encourage you to try it.

If you would like to contribute the statistics from your work to our group effort - called the Pete Theodoropoulos Memorial Folding Team - please enter team number 36425 into the program's configuration (the program asks for this information when you first install it).

You may visit the statistics page for our team Here.

There you'll also find a link to download the folding program. It really is trivially easy to install it, start it running, and never bother with it again - yet remarkably, you'll be directly helping to find a cure for Alzheimer's.