I have a bachelor’s and master’s in computer science. I’ve been out in the workforce computer programming for a year and a half and I am 24 years old.
I’ve decided that I’d rather dedicate my life to helping eradicate cancer/aging and actually be useful, rather than continue on the current path of making money. I’m told having a really satisfying job will make you happier than money. Is this true?
Where can I go such that I am of the most possible use to fight the worst diseases (especially cancer/aging, which I suspect are the worst)? I would like to go where I am not just a replaceable technician, but someone who has to think hard and in very clever ways and is actually pushing ahead the state of the art. I don’t have a biology background, which is why I say “computational” research.
Also, feel free to dampen my youthful naivete with reality, if necessary.
Have a look here: The Institute of Cancer Research
But you’ll probably find that having no biological background is a disadvantage, although not insurmountable.
Google search for bioinformatics. It was THE field about ten years ago, so it ended up getting pretty flooded. But, if you’re good, you’re still in demand. Basically, when we do reasearch now, we get tons of data at a time. We don’t look at single genes at a time anymore. With microarray technology, we scan the entire genome. So, we end up getting tens of thousands of data points. That’s the easy part. The hard part is parsing that data, so good bioinformaticists are absolutely required.
The truth is that you should probably look to companies rather than academic institutions. Companies have embraced newer technologies such as this much faster, and employ actual staff to do nothing but interpret data. Not so much in academia.
As an aside, as a biologist with average computer know how, I’m amazed that biology people haven’t gotten together with computer people and put together usable programs of data analysis; the computer guys put together really user unfriendly (to non computer guys) programs with tons of bells and whistles that we don’t need and just confuse us. If the two groups sat down together and understood each other’s needs, it would help the situation greatly. If you could put your know how into that, I’d really appreciate it!
Well, not to dampen your youthful naivete too much, but I don’t think it would be too easy to find yourself at the cutting edge of cancer research because you can program.
That said, I work for a company that does software support for large health organizations, primarily National Cancer Institute, but also American Cancer Society, National Cancer and Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control.
All of those organizations have some amount of programmers, and support contractors that do software.
So, you might not be listed as the guy who cures cancer one day, but you could still feel better about yourself at the end of the week than a programmer at Lockheed Martin, say.
I know that a lot of these organizations have a lot of SAS programmers on staff. There are a lot of large database management problems with these organizations.
Depends exactly what you mean by “computational disease research”. Anything involving clinical trials of new drugs will at some point involve statistical analysis, particularly for Phase 3 studies (i.e. studies involving large numbers of patients), which will almost certainly involve some programming (SAS and SPSS already have the hard algorithms built in, but you still need to massage the data and do something sensible with the results).
My previous job involved programming (both database and statistical) related to clinical trials, and when I started there way back when I knew essentially nothing about clinical trials. I’m guessing you’re American (only because that’s the largest group on this board), so I can’t give you many guidelines on where to look, but you could check out ACRO Members for one starting point in your search.
Yeah, you are being a bit naive. There are plenty of unemployed PhDs in the field. Without a PhD, it would be pretty tough to get your foot in the door.
My pseudo-father-in-law has a bachelors, and does computational neuroscience. He’s unemployed currently, but contracting (and he’s unemployed more because he doesn’t want to move - he is one of the few people that know this software that they use to model neural activity). It isn’t disease research (he was modeling vision, I believe, at one time - though I’m not sure what he is modeling now).
He got into it through the back door - he was functionally a lab tech, they bought a PC, he networked it, played with Unix, programmed (all over years) - eventually co-authored papers.
It depends what he has in mind when he says, “I would like to [be] someone who has to think hard and in very clever ways and is actually pushing ahead the state of the art.”
That’s probably the kind of thing a lot of us say when we’re 24.
Note that I’m just a programmer, not a biologist, nor someone with any particular knowledge of that field.
One recommendation would be to try and focus on grid computing. Advancing how much information can be processed, or how easily programs like this can be made would be something that would help pretty much all of the sciences (including medicine), and not necessitate any particular knowledge of biology.