Questions about a career in biology

[Zongo]

Greetings! I have recently discovered this place, and I'll have a bunch of questions to go around and annoy you guys with. I am considering a career in biology, but I have a few issues.

(1) First off, my main interests are biology and computer systems. What could I do that involved a middle ground? I know far more about computers then I do biology, so I figure I should probably catch up there.

(2) I'm interested in pretty much all aspects of biology, especially:
*Herpetology
*Carcinology
What resources would you guys recommend for these two subjects? Any other really good biology-related resources are also a plus, of course. I should also probably be hanging around in #biology on Freenode. Are there any better IRC channels?

(3) I have some issues that may be a concern.
*Hemophobia: this isn't nearly as bad as it once was, but it's still somewhat there.
*Trypanophobia: will this be an issue?
*Claustrophobia: I wouldn't imagine this would be much of an issue, but it's better to be safe than sorry.
*Tourette's Syndrome: right now, it's bad. But I haven't fully grown up, so it might get better. But this one probably will be an issue, won't it?
*OCD: This isn't all that bad.
I'm determined to be a biologist, I think I could deal with these. But I want to see what you people have to say.

I know I'll remember some other question I have later, so I'll post back.Thanks for reading.

EDIT: Aha, I was right!

(4) I live in Alaska. This probably is not the best place for herpetology and carcinology, but are there any good biology groups in the Anchorage-area?

[Darby]

You might want to check out bioinformatics.

[Zongo]

You might want to check out bioinformatics.

Ooh, two O'Reilly books:

• Bionformatics Programming with Python
• Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics

Are these good books to look at?

Bonus question!

It would probably be a good idea to subscribe to a biology magazine (especially regarding herpetology).
What would you recommend?

[biohazard]

Bioinformatics was also something that first occured in my mind: it is a growing business and likely to play much bigger part in research in the future. Also, carcinology is one of the areas where it is often used, so for example that pairing might work for you.

Carcinology is also something you can study/research in almost all universities and hospitals that do research.

Also, what comes to different fobias and syndromes, as a bioinformatician (or what the hell they are called :D) you don't necessary have to see blood or any human body parts, because usually other people prepare and handle the samples, and you'll be the guy who is at the computer and tells those other people what their sample and results actually mean.

[jonmoulton]

Systems biology is another area you might find interesting. There has been lots of modeling of biological systems on levels from cellular to ecosystem. Genetic algorithms are also an interesting area, though they have found more application as an optimization tool than in biology. For early systems biology work, see Odum's texts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_T._Odum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_biology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm

Biochemistry, ecology, genetics, population biology and molecular biology are good fundamentals for this sort of work, along with information theory and continuous system modeling.