[jerryhuang100]

i totally disagree on Fred's negative view of Bioinformatics. as "software is eating the world", it's actually bioinformatics is eating biology. today's main-stream biology is dealing with exploding amount of data from modern instruments, images or clinical data collected every day and mostly machine readable. to stay up-to-date a modern biologist / bioinformatist need to think biological problems in a "big-data" (i know, cliche) way, then try to gain some insight from the data with (computational) tools. today it's the algorithms, mathematical models and software packages on top of databases to pinpoint cancer SNPs and drive drug discovery. and today it's these same algorithms and math models driving how web bench works are designed. if you think biological data are "shitty", i guess you never see other kind of unstructured data out there. so many scholars in other fields envy biologist and medical scientists for something called "PubMed". on the other hand, for those purely wet bench "biologists" who think computers are magic boxes to give answers, insights, models with one push of the button, i do feel sorry for them. they are so last-gen as they just don't have the essential techniques nowadays (just like a molecular biologist not knowing pcr).