Biology students should definitely learn how to program.
I'm in my 4th year as a bio major and have been involved with several research projects. The first involved inducing schizophrenia in rats, and recording their movements in reaction to a set of audio stimuli after being given a set of varying medicines. We had folders and folders filled with spreadsheets of data -- data that would have to be manually inputted into some crappily obsolete software. Even with somewhat specialized software, each run was saved as a separate file, adding to the clutter. Our research would have definitely progressed more quickly had we had programmers that built the appropriate software to aggregate our data.
In my second research project, our team was trying to, and still is, find the metrics to 'the beautiful face.' This requires morphing pictures of women together, presenting these synthetic images to a focus group, who then rates the images. After the pictures are rated, they are subject to a natural selection type algorithm we developed, and the beauty evolution is done manually. We would've definitely found much value in recruiting a programmer who could've written a program to automate the selection process, and perhaps built an app that brought the focus group rating aspect of our research to the web. We do use hotornot.com, but it's not ideal.
I'd like to add that additionally, medical students and doctors should learn how to program. There are many many many areas in medicine and healthcare generally that are behind the tech times. Coding doctors would definitely expedite the progression of the medical field from within. At least I think so. That's what my med school personal statement was about. :P
As someone who has studied biology/medicine, and has a definite interest in programming (teaching myself currently), I hope to find myself helping in the progression of the convergence of these two fields.
I'd extend your comment to "Everyone should learn how to program". When you look at the number of repetitive tasks that take place in a typical office environment, it's amazing at how much time could be saved with a little programming.
Macros were designed to accomplish this, but they're still way to complicated to be used by most people. It would be great if there were some sort of easy to use third party system that could integrate with a number of products (Word, Excel, Websites) and provide an easy environment to build macros.
Construction? Landscaping? Farming? Jobs with lots of secretarial assistance? I think you've taken it a step too far and ignored several sectors of society. Many scientists could benefit from programming, and anyone else who has to deal with information regularly probably could as well. That doesn't equal everyone.
Arguably VB for Applications could come in handy for almost anyone. Though interestingly most farmers, carpenters, and other handy-workers are more capable of performing arithmetic than the rest of the population. Still the power of a well-tuned spreadsheet is quite amazing.
Farmers are also a bad example these days, agriculture is totally high-tech.
I'm in my 4th year as a bio major and have been involved with several research projects. The first involved inducing schizophrenia in rats, and recording their movements in reaction to a set of audio stimuli after being given a set of varying medicines. We had folders and folders filled with spreadsheets of data -- data that would have to be manually inputted into some crappily obsolete software. Even with somewhat specialized software, each run was saved as a separate file, adding to the clutter. Our research would have definitely progressed more quickly had we had programmers that built the appropriate software to aggregate our data.
In my second research project, our team was trying to, and still is, find the metrics to 'the beautiful face.' This requires morphing pictures of women together, presenting these synthetic images to a focus group, who then rates the images. After the pictures are rated, they are subject to a natural selection type algorithm we developed, and the beauty evolution is done manually. We would've definitely found much value in recruiting a programmer who could've written a program to automate the selection process, and perhaps built an app that brought the focus group rating aspect of our research to the web. We do use hotornot.com, but it's not ideal.
I'd like to add that additionally, medical students and doctors should learn how to program. There are many many many areas in medicine and healthcare generally that are behind the tech times. Coding doctors would definitely expedite the progression of the medical field from within. At least I think so. That's what my med school personal statement was about. :P
As someone who has studied biology/medicine, and has a definite interest in programming (teaching myself currently), I hope to find myself helping in the progression of the convergence of these two fields.