Pharmaceutical companies pay well for these genetic clues. In response to the growth, genomics companies are staffing up. Incyte, for instance, has more than quadrupled its staff in the past three years, from 300 employees to 1,300. So starved is this new industry for biologists that it consistently raids university faculties. Paula Stephan, a labor economist at Georgia State University in Atlanta who has studied the bioinformatics job market, says the shortage is a big problem for schools trying to launch new bioinformatic programs.
People say it's hard to start a program because they've been robbed of their faculty.
Davis, and UC Santa Cruz, have managed to get bioinformatics programs off the ground. But scientists need not have a degree in bioinformatics to work in the field. Spancake, for example, completed her Ph.D. in genetics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Her coworker, Debopriya Das, who also works as a bioinformaticist, got his Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford. Other colleagues have master's degrees and Ph.D.'s in chemistry and computer science.