First, there was the saltine cracker challenge, which allegedly has its origins at the University of Tennessee with Peyton Manning making a bet.
Then came the Sprite and banana challenge around 2005, which clearly spawned the Diet Coke and Mentos challenge, which upped the whole process in 2006. A little while later, things got dangerous. There was the condom challenge and the fire challenge in 2012 and 2013, respectively. As if as a response to being consumed in flames, the ice bucket challenged arrived in 2014.
Suddenly, the idiocy of some people on the Internet had a positive effect. The ice bucket challenge was still about stupidly one-upping your friends, but it led to an estimated $115 million going to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research.
However, some people over at the Barrow Neurological Institute and IBM wanted to take the research into ALS a bit further.
Developers at IBM created a computer system capable of answering questions when prompted. They wanted to create the perfect machine to dominate Jeopardy! They named this computer Watson after IBM’s first CEO, Thomas Watson.
After they demonstrated Watson’s dominance on the trivia show, they allowed commercial enterprises to use Watson’s massive memory. At first, cancer treatments were optimized through the collecting and evaluating of seemingly endless amounts of information.
Watson did something similar late last year with ALS research. Researchers from the Barrow Neurological Institute worked with the computer to look for causes of the rare neurological condition. Watson was about to consume every scholarly article written about the disease and do a statistical analysis of all the data points.
Much of the available information connected ALS to genes.
ALS is a rare disease that causes the degeneration of nerve cells which control muscles. Slowly, people with the disease lose the ability to move or even speak. The disease is sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease because of this famous patient. Another well-known patient with the disease is physicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking.
From all of his research, Watson discovered five genes that had not yet been linked to the disease. Researchers hope that by understanding more about the underlining genetic predisposition, they can develop more effective pharmaceutical treatments for it.
