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Comment by Techowl | Hacker News Reader

A few years back, Bill Gates said that he'd be working in biology if he were still a teenager [0]. There's a lot of exciting work happening in the field, and if anyone finds this sort of thing particularly inspiring, I'd encourage them to read up on bioinformatics -- there's plenty of programming work to be done in the biosciences.

[0] http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/heres-to-you-biolo...

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It's a pretty awesome time to be a biologist. Things are happening so quickly and profoundly. In sequencing alone, imagine having 30 years of Moore's law progress in 5 [1]; that just happened and we are still catching up to the consequences. Then there are GWAS, CRISPR, organoids, ESCs/iPSCs, superres microscopy, immunotherapy, etc. Also it is true that computational approaches will play a big role [2].

[1] http://www.genome.gov/images/content/costpermegabase_apr2015... [2] FWIW I'm hiring staff and postdoctoral positions in bioinformatics looking for folks with experience with genomics, machine learning, and/or CS.

I'm not looking to get hired, but I am looking to do statistical analysis/Manhattan plot for endometriosis variant identification using a patient group, and develop a therapy using CRISPR. Would you be able to recommend anyone I could connect with?

I don't really see biology attracting the same kind of intellect that programming does. There is an enormous, and constantly growing, amount of minutiae that must be simply remembered by rote. It seems much closer to law than to computer science.

If, instead, I were choosing exclusively based on the importance of the work for humanity, I would still go for energy research before biology. That is what civilization's survival hinges on.

Alan Kay has said the same thing on a few occasions (though he did get an undergraduate degree in the subject).

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