Subway's $5 sandwich, the brainchild of an obscure Miami franchisee, is the fast-food success story of the recession.
[Related content: savings, save money, food prices, frugal, food]
By BusinessWeek
Stuart Frankel isn't what you'd call a power player in the world of franchising.
Can Subway challenge McDonald's?
Five years ago, he owned two small Subway sandwich shops at either end of Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital. After noticing that sales sagged on weekends, he came up with an idea: He would offer every footlong sandwich (the chain also sells 6-inch versions) on Saturday and Sunday for $5, about a buck less than the usual price.
"I like round numbers," says Frankel, a brusque New Yorker who moved to Miami in 1972 and owned a drugstore before opening his first Subway outlet in 1988.
Customers liked his round number, too. Instead of dealing with idle employees and weak sales, Frankel suddenly had lines out the door. Sales rose by double digits. Nobody, least of all Frankel, knew it at the time, but he had stumbled on a concept that has unexpectedly morphed from a short-term gimmick into a national phenomenon that has turbocharged Subway's performance.
"There are only a few times when a chain has been able to scramble up the whole industry, and this is one of them," says Jeffrey T. Davis, the president of restaurant consultancy Sandelman & Associates. "It's huge."
In fact, the $3.8 billion in sales generated nationwide by the $5 footlong alone placed it among the top 10 fast-food brands in the U.S. for the year ended in August, according to NPD Group. That puts the $5 menu's success just a notch behind Yum Brands' (YUM, news, msgs) KFC and ahead of Arby's (WEN, news, msgs) and Domino's Pizza (DPZ, news, msgs). It helped privately held Subway, of Milford, Conn., lift U.S. sales 17% last year at a time when most restaurant chains, save for industry leader McDonald's (MCD, news, msgs), struggled.
Actually, make that soon-to-be-former industry leader McDonald's. Subway's low-cost franchising model and mainstream appeal have allowed it to add 9,500 locations in the past five years, for a total of about 32,000 outlets. At its current growth rate of 40 new stores a week, Subway is poised to surpass McDonald's in worldwide locations sometime early next year.
Measured by total sales, McDonald's $30 billion still dwarfs Subway's $9.6 billion, although Subway has now supplanted both Wendy's and Burger King (BKC, news, msgs) in market share.
'A life of its own'
Frankel's $5 footlong idea illustrates how a huge company can wake up and eventually seize on a good idea that's not generated at headquarters. Frankel, along with two other local managers in economically ravaged South Florida, ceaselessly championed the idea to Subway's corporate leadership amid widespread skepticism. Once it was approved, Subway's marketing team quickly generated a memorable campaign that firmly established the $5 footlong nationwide. The promotion's success spawned imitators and created an unprecedented demand for staple ingredients such as turkey, ham and tuna.
"The whole thing took on a life of its own," says Jeff Moody, the CEO of Subway's franchise-owned advertising arm, the Subway Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust.
The fact that a sandwich, the quintessential American food, has grabbed the spotlight right now comes as no surprise to some. Its appeal goes beyond the low sticker price -- you can share a footlong with a co-worker or a friend (something that's not quite as easy with a Big Mac).
"People are not eating out as much anymore, so anything that brings people together through food is much more compelling nowadays," says Michelle Barry of the Hartman Group, a Seattle consultancy that employs anthropologists and sociologists to ferret out consumer perceptions for such companies as Kraft Foods (KFT, news, msgs) and Wal-Mart Stores (WMT, news, msgs).
For Frankel, the biggest surprise from his $5 promotion was that his profit margins didn't decline. Many promotions are so-called loss leaders designed to draw customers in the hope they'll buy higher-margin items alongside the featured specials. That's one reason most offers have a time limit. Frankel's food costs did rise as a percentage of sales, but that was offset by the overall boost in volume and the increased productivity of his employees, who had less down time. Even after adding two new staffers, Frankel made money on each $5 sandwich.
Frankel kept the weekend promotion going for more than a year. At the same time, Subway's top brass was growing tired of a national ad campaign that featured spokesman Jared Fogle, who had lost 245 pounds almost a decade earlier by eating Subway 6-inch subs for lunch and dinner. Company insiders envied the success of McDonald's dollar menu and wanted a "value" offering of their own.
In September 2007, Steve Sager, a Subway development agent who oversaw about 225 franchises across South Florida, heard about the success of Frankel's $5 deal. He decided to try it in a troubled Fort Lauderdale, Fla., outlet on Commercial Boulevard, a gritty thoroughfare dotted with strip malls. On the first day of the promotion, the store nearly ran out of bread and meat. Sales doubled.
Video: Subway's recession-friendly fare
Sager called Subway co-founder Fred DeLuca, who lives in the vicinity, and excitedly shared the news. An intrigued DeLuca came by the shop and, Sager says, "saw the potential instantly." (DeLuca declined to comment.) Charlie Serabian, the owner of 50South Florida Subways, decided to launch the promotion in some of his stores. To advertise, he slapped crude homemade signs in the windows that spelled out "ALL FOOTLONGS $5." DeLuca joked that they looked like ransom letters. It didn't matter: Sales rose as much as 35%. Some locations, such as those housed inside Wal-Mart stores, did even better.
Moody, the marketing chief, hopped a flight to Fort Lauderdale a month later. He arrived at one store at 11 a.m. to find a line out the door. Frankel and Sager, who accompanied him, jumped behind the counter to help make sandwiches, while Moody talked to customers. Most were buying footlongs, and some were saving half for later.
Clearly, the South Florida crew was onto something. The question was whether it would resonate elsewhere. "Unless it was in your store, you were skeptical," Moody says. At a meeting of the franchisee marketing board that fall, Frankel presented his idea. Many owners thought the promotion would send food and labor costs soaring, erasing any hope of profits. A motion to roll it out nationally failed.
Annoying jingle
But others picked up on Frankel's idea and tried it in locations ranging from Washington to Chicago. Right before Christmas 2008, the board voted again, and the motion passed. (Franchisees still had the option to not do it.)
Moody pushed ahead with a national campaign, despite having no market research to back up the idea. "It violated all our normal processes," says Moody, whose annual ad budget is around $500 million.
Subway soon brought in its ad agency, MMB of Boston. "Let's not overcomplicate this," MMB managing partner Chad Caufield recalls thinking. The idea was to use hand gestures and an irritatingly addictive jingle to convey both the price (five fingers) and the product (hands spread about a foot apart). MMB also shot on a soundstage, giving the commercial a stylized, campy look. "We wanted to create the feeling that this was a movement taking hold," Caufield says.
The campaign was launched on March 23, 2008 -- the same month that Bear Stearns collapsed into the arms of JPMorgan Chase (JPM, news, msgs). "The timing could not have been better," says Dennis Lombardi, the executive vice president at restaurant consultancy WD Partners. Over the first two weeks, franchisees reported that sales shot up 25% on average. Within weeks, 3,600 videos of people performing the jingle appeared on YouTube. Fogle, attending the NCAA Final Four college basketball tournament soon after the launch, was serenaded with the song by students. The $5 footlong was mentioned on ESPN, "The Tonight Show" and celebrity gossip site TMZ. The North Carolina State Fair even held a $5 Footlong Song Challenge -- an "American Idol"-style event for the 4-H crowd.
The franchisee marketing board quickly voted to extend the four-week promotion to seven weeks. When that ended, Subway kept it going but limited the number of $5 sandwiches to just eight, removing items with high ingredient costs, such as the Chicken & Bacon Ranch sandwich.
Video: Subway's recession-friendly fare
Suddenly, Subway needed 50% more food supplies. Bread shortages became a problem, as the ratio of 6-inch sandwiches to footlong orders, normally 2-to-1, flipped. Subway's franchise-owned Independent Purchasing Cooperative, or IPC, had to scramble to find new sources of bread. Even mundane items, such as plastic sandwich bags from China, nearly ran out.
"I was in a panic," recalls IPC Chief Executive Jan Risi, who furiously worked the phones, cajoling her network of suppliers to run extra shifts.
Even cheaper
Soon, copycat offers emerged. Boston Market offered 11 meals for $5 each, while Domino's sold sandwiches for $4.99, and KFC launched $5 combo meals. T.G.I. Friday's began selling $5 sandwiches.
"Five dollars is the magic number now," restaurant consultant Malcolm Knapp says. "It's become a price point that consumers respond to," says Judy Cantrell, Boston Market's chief brand officer.
The question now is when the campaign will run out of steam. MMB's Caufield concedes the issue keeps him up at night: "Are we riding this pony too long?" Tony Pace, a senior executive who works with Subway's marketing arm, replies bluntly: "If you had a brand that represented nearly $4 billion in sales, would you plan an exit strategy for it?"
Can Subway challenge McDonald's?
Pace says the footlong will remain "as long as it makes good economic sense," so a decline in footlong sales could force price increases or limits, such as $5 after 4 p.m. only. (Serabian has gone the other way as the South Florida economy has worsened, offering footlongs for $4 in his stores.) There are also concerns that Subway's focus on the footlong could distract it from new growth areas, such as a planned push into breakfast items or international expansion. (Save for some tests in Australia and Canada, the $5 footlong hasn't gone beyond the U.S.)
Meanwhile, Frankel has moved on to a new idea. Now he's pushing for Subway loyalty cards that let purchasers accrue points toward free sandwiches. Driving down Interstate 95 on a cloudy autumn day, Frankel chronicles the frustrations he's had convincing DeLuca and others that this could be a hit. Maybe now that Frankel is the father of the $5 Footlong, they'll listen.
This article was reported by Matthew Boyle for BusinessWeek.
Comment
I eat $5 footlongs once or twice a week, and enjoy them.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Nano Cancer Cures?
December 15, 2009 9:15 PM PST
Can we diagnose and destroy cancer in one sitting?
by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore Font size Print E-mail Share 1 comment Yahoo!
Let's say you find a lump somewhere and decide to go in for an exam. And let's say there was a little box to check that allows you to get a shot that targets and kills cancerous cells right then and there, no surgery, no waiting, and possibly no radiation or chemo therapy down the road. Would you check the box?
These nanoshells target tumors in the lungs and, upon excitation with near-infrared light, destroy only the cancerous tissue.
(Credit: The Alliance for NanoHealth)
Since time matters when it comes to cancer, the creation of a single nanoparticle--traceable in real time via MRI--that tags and zaps cancer cells all in one procedure has a team of researchers raising their eyebrows in hopeful arches.
"Some of the most essential questions in nanomedicine today are about biodistribution--where particles go inside the body and how they get there," says Naomi Halas, a nanomedicine pioneer at Rice University in Houstin, Texas, whose findings have just been published in Advanced Functional Materials. "Noninvasive tests for biodistribution will be enormously useful on the path to FDA approval, and this technique--adding MRI functionality to the particle you're testing and using for therapy--is a very promising way of doing this."
The all-in-one particles are modeled on nanoshells, a cancer treatment Halas invented in the '90s that are now in human clinical trials. The shells harvest laser light that would typically pass through the body harmlessly and convert that light into heat that destroys cancerous cells.
Halas, who designed the new particle with assistant professor Amit Joshi of Baylor College of Medicine's Division of Molecular Imaging, added a fluorescent dye to the nanoshell so that it glows when hit by near-infrared (NIR) light.
Tracking the nanoparticles by their fluorescence, the team confirmed that the particles do indeed target cancer cells and kill them with heat. Even though human clinical trials are probably a few years out, the hope is that eventually patients will be able to get a shot with a cocktail of these nanoparticles and antibodies tailored to specific cancer types, and then sit back and watch the war on tumors in real time via MRI and/or NIR imaging.
Halas adds that the team has been careful to choose components that are either already approved for medical use or are already in clinical trials: "We're putting together components that all have good, proven track records."
Can we diagnose and destroy cancer in one sitting?
by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore Font size Print E-mail Share 1 comment Yahoo!
Let's say you find a lump somewhere and decide to go in for an exam. And let's say there was a little box to check that allows you to get a shot that targets and kills cancerous cells right then and there, no surgery, no waiting, and possibly no radiation or chemo therapy down the road. Would you check the box?
These nanoshells target tumors in the lungs and, upon excitation with near-infrared light, destroy only the cancerous tissue.
(Credit: The Alliance for NanoHealth)
Since time matters when it comes to cancer, the creation of a single nanoparticle--traceable in real time via MRI--that tags and zaps cancer cells all in one procedure has a team of researchers raising their eyebrows in hopeful arches.
"Some of the most essential questions in nanomedicine today are about biodistribution--where particles go inside the body and how they get there," says Naomi Halas, a nanomedicine pioneer at Rice University in Houstin, Texas, whose findings have just been published in Advanced Functional Materials. "Noninvasive tests for biodistribution will be enormously useful on the path to FDA approval, and this technique--adding MRI functionality to the particle you're testing and using for therapy--is a very promising way of doing this."
The all-in-one particles are modeled on nanoshells, a cancer treatment Halas invented in the '90s that are now in human clinical trials. The shells harvest laser light that would typically pass through the body harmlessly and convert that light into heat that destroys cancerous cells.
Halas, who designed the new particle with assistant professor Amit Joshi of Baylor College of Medicine's Division of Molecular Imaging, added a fluorescent dye to the nanoshell so that it glows when hit by near-infrared (NIR) light.
Tracking the nanoparticles by their fluorescence, the team confirmed that the particles do indeed target cancer cells and kill them with heat. Even though human clinical trials are probably a few years out, the hope is that eventually patients will be able to get a shot with a cocktail of these nanoparticles and antibodies tailored to specific cancer types, and then sit back and watch the war on tumors in real time via MRI and/or NIR imaging.
Halas adds that the team has been careful to choose components that are either already approved for medical use or are already in clinical trials: "We're putting together components that all have good, proven track records."
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Volunteering Computers for Science - Wall Street Journal
OCTOBER 20, 2009
Users Make Their Home PCs Available to Chase Medical By JEREMY SINGER-VINE
The next cure for a major disease is as likely to be discovered on a computer as on a laboratory bench—and scientists are enlisting ordinary citizens to volunteer to help crunch the data.
Advances in computer science have enabled medical researchers to test how proteins fold, genes interact and pandemics spread in complex digital simulations of natural environments. As these simulations become more intensive and widely used, however, computers at academic institutions and other research facilities can't keep up with the demand for medical processing power.
Indian border security guards, who regularly contract malaria, are required to carry repellents and masks. Instead, scientists are tapping into a vast network that allows the research to be parceled out in tiny workloads that can be performed on anyone's household computer when it's not otherwise being used. So far, hundreds of thousands of people in countries around the world have volunteered their computers' processing power to help advance the cause of medical research.
Here's how it works: Volunteers download an application onto their home computer that links them into a network that includes other citizen volunteers and research scientists. The network assigns each computer a small bit of a project's puzzle to solve. The process, which continues as long as the computer is turned on but idle, typically takes several hours, but can vary depending on the project and the individual computer's power. When complete, the results are automatically sent back to the network's server.
In 2003, epidemiology researcher Nicolas Maire and his colleagues at the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel began simulating how potential malaria vaccines would affect populations where the disease is most prevalent. They ran the program on a network of several dozen of their institute's computers. But as the research team graduated to the second phase of their project in 2006, adding more variables, complex interactions and data to their model, it became clear that they needed more processing power.
The new simulations could take months or years to complete on their network, and other local computing facilities had long waits or were too expensive, the team concluded. Instead they bet that, given the project's humanitarian appeal, they could recruit volunteers to crunch the data. The wager paid off: Today, nearly 35,000 users run malariacontrol.net's calculations while their computers are idle, allowing the team to complete simulations far more quickly than would otherwise have been possible. Some of the research group's findings, based on its network of home-computer users in the U.S., Europe, South America, Australia and elsewhere, have been reported in leading journals like Parasitology and Malaria Journal.
Volunteer computing, as it's known, dates back to 1996, when a group of researchers enlisted participants in a search for ever-larger prime numbers, an effort that continues to break world records. Several years later, volunteers flocked to SETI@home, a project to sift through the static in radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life.
In Myanmar, medicine is distributed to control malaria, a disease that is easy to treat but remains one of the nation's biggest killers. The government's health-care spending is the lowest world-wide
In the last five years, biomedical researchers have caught on to the possibilities of volunteer computing, and so too have the volunteers. James Whitus, who describes himself as "just an average Joe helping out," had been contributing his home computer's processing power to SETI@home until late 2004. Then he heard about the World Community Grid, a not-for-profit IBM project that provides research support to a number of different medical and humanitarian studies.
"I figured why search for extraterrestrials when you can help with research?" Mr. Whitus says. "Something that could actually make a difference here on this planet."
Today, the 28-year-old car inspector in Lafayette, Ind., and his fiancee support the grid's projects—which range from cancer-drug research to improving crop yields in developing countries—on their two desktop computers and on an old laptop that they devote solely to the cause.
Such volunteer computing projects are generally based on open-source software called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure of Network Computing, or Boinc. Volunteers download the simple application from boinc.berkeley.edu, and sign up for the projects they want to support. (Not all projects have lofty goals: One searches for the Sudoku puzzle with the fewest initial entries.)
Security Risks
An open network of so many computers might seem a security risk, and it is. But David Anderson, the Berkeley scientist who founded Boinc in 2004, says he has taken two key precautions. The first uses a system of digital signatures so that hackers cannot hijack an existing project's network. The second cordons off, or "sandboxes," all Boinc activity from the rest of a host computer, so that even if a bug or malicious code did slip into a project, it would cause minimal damage.
Still, volunteers should learn more about projects before joining them, Dr. Anderson suggests. Several sites, including Boinc's official page, host message boards where volunteers can discuss projects. After five years and more than 300,000,000 tasks performed by volunteers' computers, "there have been zero security incidents," according to Dr. Anderson.
There's also the cost to volunteers, in a higher energy bill, from keeping a computer running at all times. According to an estimate on Boinc's community-edited Web page (from the Boinc home page, search Heat and Energy Considerations), running Boinc costs about $3 a month more than leaving a computer on but idle, and about $8.80 a month more than leaving it off all the time, based on typical U.S. energy costs. The typical cost in Europe is about 200% higher, the site says.
Helping Out
See some biomedical research projects enlisting volunteer computers at boinc.berkeley.edu.
Downloading, setting up and running Boinc is no more difficult than for most other software, although it lacks the polished interface and technical support of many higher-end applications. Users with older computers should be prepared for certain frustrations, as one reporter learned by trial. A few projects refused to send any work to this volunteer's 2004 mid-range laptop, for lack of computing power. What parcels of work that were received took up to 18 hours of idle time to complete. (System requirements for individual projects are usually available on their Web sites.) After upgrading to a newer laptop, work parcels flowed where they had previously been blocked, and each took closer to four hours to complete.
Advances in personal-computer and Internet speeds have helped to triple the combined power of the volunteer computing efforts over the past two years, according to data from the site boincstats.com. Today the approximately 60 projects using Boinc harness in total about 2,500 teraflops—or twice the operations per second of the world's most powerful computer—from four million computers owned by nearly two million users. About 20 of those projects are related to medical research, to which more than 300,000 volunteers contribute. That includes the various efforts that comprise the World Community Grid.
Any scientist with the skills to set up a server can become part of the Boinc network. Researchers in most cases must pay for the servers that dispatch, gather and analyze the volunteers' data. But those costs are a small fraction of the roughly $1 million a year it costs to run a low-end supercomputer. (IBM's World Community Grid is free of cost to researchers, but the projects must be approved by an external advisory board.)
The top-supported biomedical project on Boinc is Rosetta@home, which simulates how proteins fold and could lead to novel treatments for a range of diseases. The sequence of the amino acids that comprise a protein—what may look like a whirling, intertwined, chaotic mess—precisely determines its structure and biological function. But exactly how these proteins bend along each amino acid is a vastly complex problem, one that the project's 80,000 volunteered computers help to solve by testing various permutations looking, essentially, for the most stable structure.
Don't Exist in Nature
The findings allow the Rosetta lab, run by David Baker at the University of Washington, to design proteins that don't exist in nature. Some new proteins could deactivate viruses such as the flu—as Dr. Baker's lab is trying to do for this year's H1N1 strain—by attaching to and smothering the sections of the pathogens that harm human cells. The project's biggest breakthroughs in the last couple of years have been in creating catalysts, which selectively speed up chemical reactions and which regulate almost every biological process, Dr. Baker said. One catalyst in development, for instance, is an enzyme that could slice apart genes in female mosquitoes, potentially preventing malaria transmission without using toxic chemicals.
Scientific studies that make use of the Boinc network have shown some promise, but no breakthroughs, researchers say. Findings from Rosetta@home have been published in the journals Science and Nature. But "what we haven't done yet is create enzymes that cure diseases," Dr. Baker said.
Similarly, projects associated with World Community Grid have generated dozens of research papers published in highly regarded journals. But, said Joseph Jasinski, an IBM engineer who works closely with the projects: "Have we discovered a new drug for curing AIDS? No. But we've found some great candidates."
Comment
I support this project and donate all my desktop time to it. It is my little contribution to science and research.
Users Make Their Home PCs Available to Chase Medical By JEREMY SINGER-VINE
The next cure for a major disease is as likely to be discovered on a computer as on a laboratory bench—and scientists are enlisting ordinary citizens to volunteer to help crunch the data.
Advances in computer science have enabled medical researchers to test how proteins fold, genes interact and pandemics spread in complex digital simulations of natural environments. As these simulations become more intensive and widely used, however, computers at academic institutions and other research facilities can't keep up with the demand for medical processing power.
Indian border security guards, who regularly contract malaria, are required to carry repellents and masks. Instead, scientists are tapping into a vast network that allows the research to be parceled out in tiny workloads that can be performed on anyone's household computer when it's not otherwise being used. So far, hundreds of thousands of people in countries around the world have volunteered their computers' processing power to help advance the cause of medical research.
Here's how it works: Volunteers download an application onto their home computer that links them into a network that includes other citizen volunteers and research scientists. The network assigns each computer a small bit of a project's puzzle to solve. The process, which continues as long as the computer is turned on but idle, typically takes several hours, but can vary depending on the project and the individual computer's power. When complete, the results are automatically sent back to the network's server.
In 2003, epidemiology researcher Nicolas Maire and his colleagues at the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel began simulating how potential malaria vaccines would affect populations where the disease is most prevalent. They ran the program on a network of several dozen of their institute's computers. But as the research team graduated to the second phase of their project in 2006, adding more variables, complex interactions and data to their model, it became clear that they needed more processing power.
The new simulations could take months or years to complete on their network, and other local computing facilities had long waits or were too expensive, the team concluded. Instead they bet that, given the project's humanitarian appeal, they could recruit volunteers to crunch the data. The wager paid off: Today, nearly 35,000 users run malariacontrol.net's calculations while their computers are idle, allowing the team to complete simulations far more quickly than would otherwise have been possible. Some of the research group's findings, based on its network of home-computer users in the U.S., Europe, South America, Australia and elsewhere, have been reported in leading journals like Parasitology and Malaria Journal.
Volunteer computing, as it's known, dates back to 1996, when a group of researchers enlisted participants in a search for ever-larger prime numbers, an effort that continues to break world records. Several years later, volunteers flocked to SETI@home, a project to sift through the static in radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life.
In Myanmar, medicine is distributed to control malaria, a disease that is easy to treat but remains one of the nation's biggest killers. The government's health-care spending is the lowest world-wide
In the last five years, biomedical researchers have caught on to the possibilities of volunteer computing, and so too have the volunteers. James Whitus, who describes himself as "just an average Joe helping out," had been contributing his home computer's processing power to SETI@home until late 2004. Then he heard about the World Community Grid, a not-for-profit IBM project that provides research support to a number of different medical and humanitarian studies.
"I figured why search for extraterrestrials when you can help with research?" Mr. Whitus says. "Something that could actually make a difference here on this planet."
Today, the 28-year-old car inspector in Lafayette, Ind., and his fiancee support the grid's projects—which range from cancer-drug research to improving crop yields in developing countries—on their two desktop computers and on an old laptop that they devote solely to the cause.
Such volunteer computing projects are generally based on open-source software called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure of Network Computing, or Boinc. Volunteers download the simple application from boinc.berkeley.edu, and sign up for the projects they want to support. (Not all projects have lofty goals: One searches for the Sudoku puzzle with the fewest initial entries.)
Security Risks
An open network of so many computers might seem a security risk, and it is. But David Anderson, the Berkeley scientist who founded Boinc in 2004, says he has taken two key precautions. The first uses a system of digital signatures so that hackers cannot hijack an existing project's network. The second cordons off, or "sandboxes," all Boinc activity from the rest of a host computer, so that even if a bug or malicious code did slip into a project, it would cause minimal damage.
Still, volunteers should learn more about projects before joining them, Dr. Anderson suggests. Several sites, including Boinc's official page, host message boards where volunteers can discuss projects. After five years and more than 300,000,000 tasks performed by volunteers' computers, "there have been zero security incidents," according to Dr. Anderson.
There's also the cost to volunteers, in a higher energy bill, from keeping a computer running at all times. According to an estimate on Boinc's community-edited Web page (from the Boinc home page, search Heat and Energy Considerations), running Boinc costs about $3 a month more than leaving a computer on but idle, and about $8.80 a month more than leaving it off all the time, based on typical U.S. energy costs. The typical cost in Europe is about 200% higher, the site says.
Helping Out
See some biomedical research projects enlisting volunteer computers at boinc.berkeley.edu.
Downloading, setting up and running Boinc is no more difficult than for most other software, although it lacks the polished interface and technical support of many higher-end applications. Users with older computers should be prepared for certain frustrations, as one reporter learned by trial. A few projects refused to send any work to this volunteer's 2004 mid-range laptop, for lack of computing power. What parcels of work that were received took up to 18 hours of idle time to complete. (System requirements for individual projects are usually available on their Web sites.) After upgrading to a newer laptop, work parcels flowed where they had previously been blocked, and each took closer to four hours to complete.
Advances in personal-computer and Internet speeds have helped to triple the combined power of the volunteer computing efforts over the past two years, according to data from the site boincstats.com. Today the approximately 60 projects using Boinc harness in total about 2,500 teraflops—or twice the operations per second of the world's most powerful computer—from four million computers owned by nearly two million users. About 20 of those projects are related to medical research, to which more than 300,000 volunteers contribute. That includes the various efforts that comprise the World Community Grid.
Any scientist with the skills to set up a server can become part of the Boinc network. Researchers in most cases must pay for the servers that dispatch, gather and analyze the volunteers' data. But those costs are a small fraction of the roughly $1 million a year it costs to run a low-end supercomputer. (IBM's World Community Grid is free of cost to researchers, but the projects must be approved by an external advisory board.)
The top-supported biomedical project on Boinc is Rosetta@home, which simulates how proteins fold and could lead to novel treatments for a range of diseases. The sequence of the amino acids that comprise a protein—what may look like a whirling, intertwined, chaotic mess—precisely determines its structure and biological function. But exactly how these proteins bend along each amino acid is a vastly complex problem, one that the project's 80,000 volunteered computers help to solve by testing various permutations looking, essentially, for the most stable structure.
Don't Exist in Nature
The findings allow the Rosetta lab, run by David Baker at the University of Washington, to design proteins that don't exist in nature. Some new proteins could deactivate viruses such as the flu—as Dr. Baker's lab is trying to do for this year's H1N1 strain—by attaching to and smothering the sections of the pathogens that harm human cells. The project's biggest breakthroughs in the last couple of years have been in creating catalysts, which selectively speed up chemical reactions and which regulate almost every biological process, Dr. Baker said. One catalyst in development, for instance, is an enzyme that could slice apart genes in female mosquitoes, potentially preventing malaria transmission without using toxic chemicals.
Scientific studies that make use of the Boinc network have shown some promise, but no breakthroughs, researchers say. Findings from Rosetta@home have been published in the journals Science and Nature. But "what we haven't done yet is create enzymes that cure diseases," Dr. Baker said.
Similarly, projects associated with World Community Grid have generated dozens of research papers published in highly regarded journals. But, said Joseph Jasinski, an IBM engineer who works closely with the projects: "Have we discovered a new drug for curing AIDS? No. But we've found some great candidates."
Comment
I support this project and donate all my desktop time to it. It is my little contribution to science and research.
Gaps in DNA banks lead to tragedy
Tens of thousands of missing samples prevent police from solving crimes
Jeffrey Phelps / AP
Police say murder suspect Walter Ellis, shown in September, eluded capture for 20 years because authorities did not have his DNA on file.
Most viewed on msnbc.com
updated 5:40 p.m. ET, Mon., Dec . 14, 2009
MADISON, Wis. - During what police say was a 20-year killing spree in Milwaukee, Walter Ellis left his DNA behind all along the way — everywhere but the one place where it might have saved a life.
Ellis should have given a DNA sample to the state crime databank during a prison stint in the early part of this decade, but he had another inmate pose as him, authorities say. As a result, when analysts tried to identify DNA in bodily fluids from one of the slayings back in 2003, no matches turned up.
Investigators didn't connect Ellis to the crimes until this fall, when they seized genetic material from his toothbrush. By then, it was too late for the woman police say was Ellis' seventh and final victim.
"If they would have got his DNA when they were supposed to get it, maybe my cousin would still be here," said Sarah Stokes, whose cousin, 28-year-old prostitute Ouithreaun Stokes, was found beaten and strangled in an abandoned rooming house in 2007.
An Associated Press review found tens of thousands of DNA samples are missing from state databanks across the country because they were never taken or were lost. The missing evidence — combined with big backlogs at the nation's crime labs that result in DNA samples sitting on shelves for years without being analyzed and entered into the databanks — is preventing investigators from cracking untold numbers of cases. And some of those gaps have had tragic consequences.
"If you got missing samples, some of those people are out there raping your wives and abducting and murdering your children this week," said former Charlottesville, Va., police Capt. J.E. Harding, who helped uncover missing samples in that state during a search for a serial rapist.
Confusing laws blamed
Crime lab supervisors, state police and prison officials blame the failure to collect samples on new and confusing laws and a lack of coordination among the many different law enforcement agencies and institutions responsible for taking DNA.
"I would just about guarantee you every state has an issue with this," said Lisa Hurst, who tracks DNA convictions for Gordon Thomas Honeywell, an organization that lobbies on public safety and biotechnology issues.
The AP review found 27 states either failed to collect some DNA samples or are unable to say whether they took one from every offender who owes one.
The case against Ellis, who is set to go trial this spring, prompted an audit in Wisconsin that found 12,000 convict samples are missing. The AP review further found that Illinois failed to get DNA from about 50,000 offenders, Colorado from 2,000, and Virginia from about 8,400.
Exactly how many samples are missing across the country is unknown. The National Institute of Justice estimated in 2003 that offenders owed up to 1 million uncollected samples and as many as 300,000 samples may be waiting for processing. The backlog grew to about 450,000 by 2008. The institute had no updated estimate of uncollected samples.
Backlog at labs
At least 13 states are dealing with more samples than they can handle. Kansas, for example, has nearly 40,000 on its crime lab shelves, waiting for upload.
Police in Columbus, Ohio, say Robert N. Patton Jr. committed 37 rapes over a decade and a half. As with Ellis in Milwaukee, he could have been stopped earlier.
Patton had submitted his DNA in 2001 while behind bars for burglary, but it was not entered into the database until 2004, two days before he climbed through an apartment window and raped Diana Cunningham. Police say he attacked 13 women in all after supplying his DNA.
If Patton's genetic material "had been processed in a timely fashion, he never would have gotten to me or gotten to any of the others," said Cunningham, now 25. "It's scary how many more people are going to be victimized because their attackers aren't going to be caught. And it would be so easy for them to be caught if they could make the matches."
Patton is now serving a 68-year prison sentence.
Comment
QWhy donmt we spend some of the stimulus money to get up to date? That would create American jobs, right?
Jeffrey Phelps / AP
Police say murder suspect Walter Ellis, shown in September, eluded capture for 20 years because authorities did not have his DNA on file.
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updated 5:40 p.m. ET, Mon., Dec . 14, 2009
MADISON, Wis. - During what police say was a 20-year killing spree in Milwaukee, Walter Ellis left his DNA behind all along the way — everywhere but the one place where it might have saved a life.
Ellis should have given a DNA sample to the state crime databank during a prison stint in the early part of this decade, but he had another inmate pose as him, authorities say. As a result, when analysts tried to identify DNA in bodily fluids from one of the slayings back in 2003, no matches turned up.
Investigators didn't connect Ellis to the crimes until this fall, when they seized genetic material from his toothbrush. By then, it was too late for the woman police say was Ellis' seventh and final victim.
"If they would have got his DNA when they were supposed to get it, maybe my cousin would still be here," said Sarah Stokes, whose cousin, 28-year-old prostitute Ouithreaun Stokes, was found beaten and strangled in an abandoned rooming house in 2007.
An Associated Press review found tens of thousands of DNA samples are missing from state databanks across the country because they were never taken or were lost. The missing evidence — combined with big backlogs at the nation's crime labs that result in DNA samples sitting on shelves for years without being analyzed and entered into the databanks — is preventing investigators from cracking untold numbers of cases. And some of those gaps have had tragic consequences.
"If you got missing samples, some of those people are out there raping your wives and abducting and murdering your children this week," said former Charlottesville, Va., police Capt. J.E. Harding, who helped uncover missing samples in that state during a search for a serial rapist.
Confusing laws blamed
Crime lab supervisors, state police and prison officials blame the failure to collect samples on new and confusing laws and a lack of coordination among the many different law enforcement agencies and institutions responsible for taking DNA.
"I would just about guarantee you every state has an issue with this," said Lisa Hurst, who tracks DNA convictions for Gordon Thomas Honeywell, an organization that lobbies on public safety and biotechnology issues.
The AP review found 27 states either failed to collect some DNA samples or are unable to say whether they took one from every offender who owes one.
The case against Ellis, who is set to go trial this spring, prompted an audit in Wisconsin that found 12,000 convict samples are missing. The AP review further found that Illinois failed to get DNA from about 50,000 offenders, Colorado from 2,000, and Virginia from about 8,400.
Exactly how many samples are missing across the country is unknown. The National Institute of Justice estimated in 2003 that offenders owed up to 1 million uncollected samples and as many as 300,000 samples may be waiting for processing. The backlog grew to about 450,000 by 2008. The institute had no updated estimate of uncollected samples.
Backlog at labs
At least 13 states are dealing with more samples than they can handle. Kansas, for example, has nearly 40,000 on its crime lab shelves, waiting for upload.
Police in Columbus, Ohio, say Robert N. Patton Jr. committed 37 rapes over a decade and a half. As with Ellis in Milwaukee, he could have been stopped earlier.
Patton had submitted his DNA in 2001 while behind bars for burglary, but it was not entered into the database until 2004, two days before he climbed through an apartment window and raped Diana Cunningham. Police say he attacked 13 women in all after supplying his DNA.
If Patton's genetic material "had been processed in a timely fashion, he never would have gotten to me or gotten to any of the others," said Cunningham, now 25. "It's scary how many more people are going to be victimized because their attackers aren't going to be caught. And it would be so easy for them to be caught if they could make the matches."
Patton is now serving a 68-year prison sentence.
Comment
QWhy donmt we spend some of the stimulus money to get up to date? That would create American jobs, right?
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