I find it really sucky that it hardly gets any traction anymore. Our combined computing powers are vastly growing every day, yet these efforts are not reaching mainstream. Bigger companies who'd love to show they are involved with the world, would rather post donations.
Maybe donations are more effective, who knows. I have a feeling we are missing out. I've been thinking of ways to have the system get more traction, or something that would stimulate development/improvements of a distributed computing grid for world problems, but can't figure it out.
If anything I would love to contribute my time and efforts to promote such a thing. I think being able to prolong the live expectancy of many patients, cheaper cures, or right-out curing some types of cancer is a very viable platform that could get some traction down these lines, and a very important one at that.
I can see why the idea of looking for ET or analyzing gamma ray bursts to map neutron stars is a bit distant for people.
I think this proves once again that scientists suck at marketing. Maybe we can help out, start a combined collaboration project to improve the efficiency of distributed workloads in this specific field to start with.
As I'm writing this, more and more I want to do this. But I'm just a webdev with the powers of Google at my disposal.