Re: Nanotech or Biotech programming question.

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun May 25 2003 - 23:29:18 MDT

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    Mike, I'll try to address some of this.

    > I'm curious to see if anyone knows where to find out
    > what kinds of preparations might do well with
    > eventually working in nanotech programming?

    Harvey's comments are right on in certain respects.
    Genomes are programs and one needs a background that
    includes both computer science as well as either
    biochemistry or molecular biology.

    There isn't any concept of "nanotech programming"
    per se at this time. There is "biotech programming"
    and one can consider development in the areas
    both genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as well
    as gene therapies to involve aspects of this.

    This is going to transition into "whole genome
    engineering" (and whole genome programming) over
    the next couple of yeas but I've been trying rather
    unsuccessfully to push this forward over the last
    couple of years so it seems that it will develop
    slowly.

    Real "nanotech programming" will not develop until
    we have real nanocomputers in real nanorobots and
    that is probably 15+ years away. Interestingly
    (to me) there will be an emphasis on space efficiency
    in nanocomputers within nanorobots so experience with
    assembly language programming may well be useful.
    As one will likely be able to program the hardware
    at a molecular level it may be knowledge of things
    like FPGA's (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) may
    well be useful.

    > I've been going back to school to get a degree in
    > computer science (I was doing COBOL programming, but
    > lost that job, so I'm looking to broaden/update some
    > skills),

    Hmmm... you may want to read:
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/21/164247&mode=thread&tid=137
    on the possible shortage of mainframe techies.

    > but I'd really like to work in nanotech or
    > biotech, so I've been trying to find any programs for
    > either, with no luck.

    The "buzzword" that you need to know is "bioinformatics".
    There are courses one can now take in this. They tend to
    end up in the comp-sci or the molecular biology departments
    of various universities. One needs to understand both
    the architectures of genomes as well as the tools currently
    used to deal with them (BLAST, FASTA, etc). It is not strictly
    necessary to have either a comp-sci or a mol-bio degree
    to work in these areas. A seach of bioinformatics (tools)
    using Google, or books at Amazon would probably give you
    a number of sources -- one should choose sources carefully
    because they can be slanted to the theoretical (comp-sci)
    side or the practical (Mol-bio) side.

    The job prospects in these areas are relatively good because
    we are going into a state of information overload with respect
    to genomic information and so people qualified in these areas
    should likely have good job prospects.

    Experience in bioinformatics (over the next 10-15 years)
    may give one a partial background in preparation for
    nanoinformatics (but may need to be balanced with
    experience in programming "small" [assembler] as well
    as programming the hardware [i.e. the structures of
    the molecules]) as I suggest above.

    Robert



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