Feeling constricted by commerce? Big research institutes are opening or broadening bioinformatics departments and building information partnerships with their corporate colleagues. Duke University recently joined the computer-programming researchers club when it won a $7.2 million National Science Foundation grant to boost its bioinformatics resources.
"There's a huge need for bioinformatics people," says Atul Butte, a fellow in bioinformatics at Children's Hospital in Boston and an instructor at Harvard University. "There are very few people who know exactly how to download the human genome right now. Even though it's publicly available, to do anything really fun with that requires some training and expertise; those people with expertise in bioinformatics are really hard to find."
Even scientists who prefer a wet slide to a dry computer screen have confiscated the keyboards from the computer nerds and are trying their best to master the multiple databases and computer software programs required to find ...
