why I'd like to specialize in bioinformatics

I was at the local public radio station last Sunday when I met up with Dr. Jack Zilfou, who hosts the Arabic music program then about every other week. He's a biochemist who develops new medicines. If you Google his name, he has actually authored or co-authored a good deal of research cited in other publications. The last time I saw him was when I was in high school and so we caught up. In addition to finding out that he listened to a lot of thrash metal when he was my age, I learned about the growing opportunities in bioinformatics from him.

“Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on.” ― Donald Knuth, noted 31337 h4x0r

I had heard about this field vaguely before, but didn't pay it much mind. Jack speaks very highly of this frontier in science. Apparently, he depends on bioinformatics specialists to glean useful information from scads of raw biological data generated every day. After he explained the field in some more detail, it sounded pretty interesting. I did some research on it and found it even more appealing after a closer look. The algorithms entailed in bioinformatics appear to deal mainly with discrete areas of mathematics that I really enjoy using.¹ I communicated this interest of mine to the professor in Bioinformatics at Lehigh when I was asking about how I could study this field and he said that there isn't a Bioinformatics degree program per se, but there is a relevant track in the Computer Science department and bade me good luck.

So, double win. Since I'm already a CS major, I don't have to make a 180 degree turn. Maybe 30 degrees. Here's the triple win for the trifecta:



Wow. Without the labels, I would have guessed that was the graph of the velocity of something being shot out of a mass driver. There is a great demand to deal with this glut of new data and, if the median salary figures mean anything, a relative shortage of qualified people. I can definitely see myself getting avenged for middle school and a little less than half of high school. Eat shit, assholes! Of course, if I had a billion dollars tomorrow I would still enter a CS / math career—because I love these two fields with all my heart. However:



And on top of that, the excitement of knowing that people in the next room are using cancer-causing restriction enzymes. Dipset!

The single fail in this situation, albeit not an epic one, is that Perl seems to be really popular in bioinformatics. That makes sense since the field is mainly concerned with crunching assloads of text, and esp. a lot of pattern matching. However, Perl has an ugly object system, no exception handling and can easily make a Linear A tablet look like Curious George. If I use BioPerl in my career, I just hope no one on my team likes writing illegible garbage. Because I've seen that shit and it's not nice.

¹ - I am also busting my ass retracing my steps over all the important theorems I learned in calculus that were taken for granted in school. I'm surprised I understood anything at all after we basically skipped over the very basic idea of infinitesimals. I'm virtually certain discrete math will always be my strongest suit though.