Stanford University's Folding@Home program has gotten a lot of play this week, and so it should. The program harnesses the power of idling PC's and PS3's to calculate data that will eventually help find cures for Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's, various types of Cancer and other diseases.

This is all well and good and I'm sure we all want to do something to help the cause, but how does this program really work? What exactly is protein folding and what will be the eventual outcome? GameVideos producer Kathleen Sanders finds out in this sit down interview with Sony's r&d manager, Dr. Richard Marks.

This is a program all owners of the PS3 should try and opt into if they can. I know I would if I actually had a PS3, but I will be downloading the PC version to use on my computer here at home. If you are interested in joining a team for the experiment, why not join our own newly formed Team Kotaku. And as Kathleen so eloquently puts it at the end of the interview, "If you don't download it, then you're kind of automatically an asshole."

I will warn you: this is a very scientifical and techie interview with lots of big words, so if it's early where you are, you might want to down a couple cups of coffee before taking this one on.

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