Thanks for the insights! One thing though, protein folding is just one tiny bit of molecular dynamics research (and not really crucial at that often, due to the rise of high res cryo EM and good xray crystallography), so I would hope there are other uses for md.. I studied protein "mechanical" function/dynamics itself, and its manipulation by ligands, for example, and would hope that stuff like that would eventually seem useful to pharma companies.

But yeah, the md crowd should have tighter communication with the therapeutics crowd!

BTW just because you switch around your research-targets when funding changes doesn't imply that the research is useless. For example right now there is a lot of money funnelled into corona-research (for obvious reasons).

I do agree it's difficult to formulate how to ask for donations (money or cpu-time), you need to seem optimistic otherwise nobody would do it but research takes a huge amount of money and cpu-time and calendar time so there surely is a gap here between expectations and reality..