That's pure ignorant bigotry, although it might be well-received in a crowd of programmers who also know nothing of what biological research is like. You've go

That's pure ignorant bigotry, although it might be well-received in a crowd of programmers who also know nothing of what biological research is like. You've got to keep in mind that the main task in biology is inference of biological structures and processes. This is complicated by a number of factors: (1) Biological systems are typically way more complex than computer systems. (2) They are comprised of components which are way too small to see in action or manipulate, so all inferences are from second-order effects presumed (often inaccurately) to arise from the subsystem under study. Designing a biology experiment to cope with these difficulties is an exceptionally difficult skill to master. Compare that to programming, where the central task is the construction of a procedure using well-understood components, the states of which can easily be queried. Claiming that computer scientists would have an easier time learning biology than the reverse is like claiming that chess is a more sophisticated game than go because the lines of tactical analysis are often longer. It ignores the relative complexities of the systems, and the fact that you can usually say more about the simpler system, and usually say it more elegantly. Incidentally, I am not a biologist. I am a mathematician who has moved into statistical genetics. However, my last postdoc advisor was a formally trained biologist who taught himself statistics and computer science, and has made his career in bioinformatics. But he could hold his own in both those fields.