I guess this has been around for a few years but I just heard of it today. This was taken from their web site

"Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases
What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.

Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved."

So instead of building a supercomputer they utilize other peoples computers to go through the calculations, testing, and measuring. So far from what I read they are not only utilizing home computers but also some PS3 (gaming console) users have downloaded it to their machine to work when they are not on.

I would suggest that anyone interested read about it before you download their program to participate. To me It makes sense to help out. So far it has been running in the background and not cause my cpu to slow down. I think it only uses any unused part of your processor while you are on.

If people are interested they have an option to create a team. Meaning they keep track of how many your members have completed and post the top teams. You don't really win anything. Naturally our team name would be this site.

Just thought I would share it with you. here is the site http://folding.stanford.edu/ this if for the teams http://folding.stanford.edu/stats.html

Take care
Chris