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Bioinformatics is cool, but it's basically less sexy than you might think. There are various directions to work on, but the kind of work is essentially statisti
by gintas 17y ago
Bioinformatics is cool, but it's basically less sexy than you might think. There are various directions to work on, but the kind of work is essentially statistics and pattern matching. If you want to figure out what genes do or how proteins fold in general, go read a textbook. Spending a year on a single gene processing gigabytes of dirty data may not be as sexy as you might think. Or it might be if that's your cup of tea, but as I said, in the end, it's mostly statistics.
- bonecandy 17y agoInteresting. Pattern matching, eh? I'm pretty good with regular expressions... sign me up! :)
- indigoviolet 17y agoThat's a very poor representation of bioinformatics. There's certainly a lot of data munging and cleaning (like in any field with lots of data), but bioinformatics/computational biology is not about dumb pattern matching or just writing code. Biologists can code just fine (I got a job at Facebook off a PhD in computational biology). It's all about data mining and machine learning on biological data, to gain real insight about the functioning of an organism, often then doing the experiments to test that insight. I've seen lots of computer scientists and programmers jump in and flounder, because they're under the misconception that all it takes is the application of canned algorithms to a new data set. You need to understand biology (genomics, molecular biology, genetics, structural biology), first and foremost. Then you need to understand a significant amount of statistics, information theory, and computer science. This isn't meant to discourage you, but you're not going to get far beyond doing more web programming for biology websites if you don't teach yourself some of these areas.