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Comment by pama | Hacker News Reader

I’m happily impressed that non experts find this area intriguing. I hope more people start to work at the interface of biology, chemistry, and AI.

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Dan Gusfield wrote a book in 1997 entitled "Algorithms on strings, trees and sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology". We (what was then the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland) found some of the techniques described there to be useful in (natural) language analysis, particularly morphology and for comparing words in related languages.

The intersection between biology and computer science is by far my favorite topic. I wish I would have gone into bioinformatics after my CS masters degree. Both sciences really get the best out of the other.

Most bioinformaticians are biologists.

It depends on what type (and also whether you distinguish computational biology from bioinformatics). The people who create new algorithms for sequence assembly, protein folding, etc. tend to be computer scientists who got into biology. On the other hand, the people who analyze biological data computationally tend to be biologists who got into computing.

They are arguably computer scientists who do “bioinformatics” by building tools. Different skill set. Also not a large number of them.

Most bioinformatics jobs need domain specific bio knowledge.

Things will change even more as DNNs take over.

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