I haven't followed bitcoin at all so I can't help you much. Except maybe to point out something else that I don't know much about, but it is a BOINC project that has 'coin' in the name:
http://www.bitcoinutopia.net/bitcoinutopia/
If you want to invest in specialized hardware
(AISCs miners that plug into a USB port), you can rack up a ton of boinc points.
Top users: a couple of them are doing 1 billion boinc points per day.
Top crunchers on free-dc stats for boinc utopia project:
Top teams
Our current TeAm rank for boinc combined is 36 but our RAC rank is 56 I think because crunchers are investing in AISCs and racking up a c**pload of boinc points on this project.
However, your are only bitcoin mining (not a science project per se). On the good side, the bitcoin utopia folks are donating 85% of profits to research projects. Hopefully that's accurate.
Clearly this "boinc project" has massive credit inflation though.
What do you all think?
EDIT: you can buy a usb ASIC (2 GH/sec hashrate) for $25
here
Not sure how many ppd it'll do though (lowest end ASIC)