Donnie Berkholz wrote:

> Macromolecular graphics tools I really consider biochemistry, so they
> can go either way. But I more often hear biochemistry elongated as
> biological chemistry than chemical biology. So if forced to categorize
> one or the other, I lean toward chemistry.

It all depends on the size of the molecules and the amount of 
specialization of the researchers, I think. We could go to the extreme 
of a category for each package if we were perverse enough. :)

I'm just starting to explore the Bioconductor Project 
(http://www.bioconductor.org). When all is said and done, Bioconductor, 
though it's primarly a collection of R code for cancer and genetics 
research, is really applied math and computer science. For example, I'm 
using some of the routines in Bioconductor for computer performance 
engineering.

Of course, my father was a biochemist and the correspondences between 
computer science, computational biochemistry and genetics were not lost 
on me. In short, my vote is for biology or biocomputing or 
bioinformatics rather than biochemistry or chemistry.

Just on the off chance some of you are interested in the heavy stuff, 
the good folks in Seattle at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center 
are having an advanced R programming class in January. I've already 
spoken to the organizers and they've assured me that the course is more 
about R than bioinformatics and that computer scientists like myself are 
welcome. If I go I will be bringing a Gentoo laptop, of course. :) For 
more details, visit  https://cobra.fhcrc.org/rforbioc/

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com

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