Doing biology on the computer? and how exactly?

Question

i would rather go into biology than math or physics, but it seems to me, one would need very little materials for math (like a pencil and some books and paper basicaly) ,

but the other day i was listening to this old timer physicist, who said that if he had the choice now, he also would have picked biology, because you can do most of your work and learning on the computer

... i don't know where he gets that idea ... could someone please enlighten me?

i would have thought biology required much more labtime etc.

he was on coasttocoast a few nights ago, and said he worked with Richard Feynman, and Oppenheimer, etc, if i remember correctly

Answer 1

Biology does need lab time for the set-up, but then a lot of the time, you feed your prepared sample into an instrument, and it returns a computer file with the results.

And there's a ton of areas where people have already done lots and lots and lots of work, but someone has to go over it all.  For instance, here's the site of a project that is gearing up, called the 1000 genomes project.  There will be a lot fo labwork to be done, but someone has to analyze all the results afterards.

So there is lab work at the bench, but there's tons of computer work to do too.

Answer 2

It depends on what field of biology you are talking about.

Genomics involves minimal lab work (nowadays anyway), but a large amount of time comparing sequences on the computer and using algorithms to predict protein structure and function.