Today's Fast Company Assignment: Do Cancer Research in Your Sleep.

As my story "Look Who's Curing Cancer" describes, IBM's Worldwide Community Grid is a project of breathtaking scope and ambition. The idea couldn't be simpler: Let scientists use available downtime on computers to perform math that helps accelerate cancer, AIDS, and other public health breakthroughs. Using algorithms, researchers design virtual experiments to assess up to millions of molecules that could lead to an effective drug. This is astronomically more than they can test by doing...