I wonder what are the potential career choices in bioinformatics for a computer science major who hasn't taken many biology/chemistry/genetics courses. Any insight?
I work on a bioinformatics team in a research environment and have no bio coursework/background. There is a ton of standard IT work here.
I do mainly data integration and standard reporting stuff. For example, reports for "where is my sample in the pipeline, has the fastq been generated, where are the variant call results?" But being interested in the bio/genetics stuff is a huge plus. Hackers in the space seem welcome and needed. You gotta fight the credential hierarchy some - you clearly don't matter as much as the MD/PhD, but sometimes they should listen to you, like when, say, it comes to the programming language choice you make for the app they will use. That said, I sneak in what I think is best for the task and if that means Ruby or Clojure instead of Java, results are what matters in the end.
I work at Counsyl, a pre-pregnancy genetic testing company, and I can confirm that there is a ton of work for people not versed in bio. Everything from assay & sequencing visualization tools to more traditional IT challenges like "How do we manage the huge amount of data coming off the seq machines?" -- which is terabytes per day.
I don't have a bio background so I work on software tools and automation to support the rest of the company. Counsyl has huge respect for all levels of science and engineering, so you don't face a credential hierarchy everywhere (but Counsyl is probably unique in this area). We have a strong solve-problems-with-software culture that any dev would be comfortable with.
A key activity in bioinformatics is developing software tools for analyzing and interpreting data. If you have no knowledge of biology, you could still work as as soft engg. in this field.
If you are willing to learn basic molecular biology (structure of DNA, central dogma, etc.), you can get a job as a bioinformatician, bioinformatics analyst, bioinformatics engg, etc. where you could be analyzing biomedical datasets.
No. I sit side-by-side with PhDs in bioinformatics and am useful because I can write crazy SQL, can munge data at the cmd line and with ruby/clojure, and simply don't care what format data comes to me in. I have some preferences, but I'll work with whatever - many of the bioinformatics PhDs will know a little scripting (Perl or R) but are more valuable doing other work rather than pounding out parsing scripts and doing data transformations.
We do work that winds up in people's actual medical records - meaning that genomics analysis we do influences/directs actual medical treatment for patients.
That said, I wish I knew more biology and statistics, which is just interesting to me. I'd feel a little "key" to the work rather than a "nice" addition to the team.
Forgive me for being a status/autonomy whore but it sounds like you are a respected, professional, “part of the team”. Neither money nor more importa tly prestige flows that way.
I have absolutely no doubt that the work you are doing is useful, relevant and a genuine contribution to society and the enterprise of science. But how many people who are “just” programmers or “just” bioinformaticians, no Ph.D. end up as first, second or third authors on papers?
That is the coin of the realm, right? It certainly is in Chemistry, Biology and Big Lab/Group Physics, yeah?
No worries, I think you have the right read on the prestige issue. Of course in an academic research center, no one makes any money and prestige is reserved for grant-winners and first authors in Nature.
Publications would be hard as a non-PhD. If you wanted to focus on that, I have found that PIs welcome outsiders into their research groups. I'm certain you could put yourself in a position to publish with the same amount of credit as a grad student on a team (not much?). Especially with good data hacking skills, someone will be willing to help you scratch that publication itch. I think it would be like having a major side-project in addition to a fulltime job though.
Oddly enough, even though the work I do here is less technical than what I have done in the private sector, I seem to perceive a slight up-tick in respect from enterprise software groups.
