Originally posted by Tanga Palti:
What will be the role of Software engineer(or CS in general) in biotechnology?
CS in general is good, but the demand for the average sweng has been dwindling. For the cool stuff such as bioinformatics, they have been cross-training people now at universities so they can grad with a Phd in Bioinformatics. Companies are looking to hire people like this, not someone with 10 years in IT/CS. The other stuff is really just IT work and follows that trend.
Will it get a primary importance or secondary one?
Software will always play second fiddle to the science. Frequently Bioinformatics is used to rule out cases in the discovery process rather than rule in so it is difficult to say "this drug was discovered independently by software". This puts the wet research ahead.
Will it be a major shift in thinking?
I'm not sure what you mean here - there is a ton of stuff going on in this area now. If you've been developing software and get a job in biotech, it will probably be the same kind of thing - possibly more algorithms, web services, many vendor "enterprise type" applications.
[ February 23, 2004: Message edited by: Jim Baiter ]