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