Stranded with a blown-out rudder in the middle of Los Angeles' shipping lanes last summer, Trey Ideker drifted for three hours before he could repair his sailboat and get back on course. It was one of the few times someone might call him rudderless.
While at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the computer science and engineering major had chosen a traditional route tinkering with machines. Then as a senior, he took freshman biology and discovered that what he had always considered a "soft science" was much more quantitative than he thought. "That's when I realized, hey, cells are little machines."
He was applying to graduate schools in his majors when a friend tipped him off to the ideal marriage of his original and burgeoning interests: Leroy Hood was recruiting computer scientists to his molecular biology program at University of Washington. Emboldened by "the realization that I wasn't giving up computer science ...
