Stanford University has a program for recherch on human proteins for desease such as Altzimers and Parkinsons. Read it in a MaximumPC article. Folding@home uses your computer, well, your CPU to crunch numbers and processing data to help them. If anyone's got some spare cycles, I suggest you donate.
http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html
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I used to use this program, but stopped because it always used to jam and take months and months to complete some proteins/whatever :/
Oh well, it will be more useful than GIMPS, so join the team!
http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=42236
Team number 42236
There is a government orgranization that researches the galaxy for "extra terestrials" and they also have the same type of program that uses people's computers to crunch numbers. Personally though I'd never open up my computer to any type of organization for any purposes. They might discover my secret stash of porn hidden deep within folders where no one would ever look... "steamapps".
[addsig]You mean SETI? Yeah, thats been around for years. Dont worry, they wont find your porn, unless theyve written their program to search your harddrive, and people would notice stuff like that. Anyway, I doubt anyone (including the CIA/NSA) has an algorithm that could distinguish pr0n from normal pics.
Oh, but thanks for telling us where it is anyway. 
actually i think such algorithms exist (for tracing kiddie pron e.g.) all they do is look for more then a certain treshold of "skin" colour. Sure it'll miss out or find crap too much, but it gives clues to search further.
[addsig]"The SETI Institute is a nonprofit corporation founded in 1984 (California Corporation #1261957). The Institute is a scientific and educational organization governed by the provisions of Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code, and the Institute's Federal identification number for reporting and tax purposes is 94-2951356."
That is to say, its a private company, not a government body. I used to have it till I reformatted recently. The novelty of it working away in the background wore off and it just became another one of those programs I switch off but never get round to deleting.
I like the sound of Folding@home though, and I'm sure my all powerful home computer will speed up their research by decades. 
Every little helps though, I'll download it at home and join the team.
[UPDATE] Installed it:
Due time: April 2 19:51:20[addsig]
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Heh, my Athlon XP 2500+ has been crunching away at 100% for about 5 days straight now (including nights) and managed the TINKER core with 400 frames in about 2 days and a half and now finishing up the AMBER core with 50 frames. Got about a hour left, to which its been almost 2 days.
My stats: http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=userpage&username=Pilot_-_AMD
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