I think having a strong sense of creativity and that desire to go into the unknown is something that's going to make somebody very successful. Anyone who has a solid science background could do very well in any of these positions. And a background in computers would be really good. It's getting to the point where computer technology is inseparable from biotechnology. One example stems from the large amounts of data generated from the human genome project.
Data management is a huge issue.
Computers and digital technology are being used to compare DNA sequences and also to catalog the DNA data coming from the sequence project. Scientists are turning the DNA sequence information, which in itself is just basically a large alphabet, into useful information or words, and determining what the words mean. This is an emerging area called bio-informatics that will be a very explosive technology area in the 21st Century. The second main area involves using computers in modeling. When we understand something about a molecule structure, by computer prediction and by computer modeling we often can make some assumptions and predictions about its function.