GOOD Morning, I would like some insight into the biocoding field ? Is it related to biomedical engineering ? or genetics or comp science ? Would it be good to get some knowledge and educaton in it at a high school level if one is interested in the medical field in general. My son is not 100% sure if he wants to be a doctor but he is interested in the medical field and is fairly good in mathematics. Any experience or advice would be appreciated. Is it the same as bioinformatics?
The answer to your first three questions is yes, related to BME, genetics and CS. The answer to your last question is probably a firm no. This is WAY down the line in the field. It would sort of be like asking if a high schooler interested in engineering if they should learn about viscous flow.
Have him or her concentrate on the more fundamental things like does he like interfacing with people? Would he rather work directly on humans or with stuff other people use on or for humans. Being a doctor (except for the few things like pathology and radiology, likely first replaced by AI) is first and foremost about human to human interaction day in and day out.
Bio Coding uses System Verilog , which is an integrated circuit logic design tool to work on genetics and living cells.
This is called synthetic biology , so a biology major and math double major or minor,
might lead to a career in brocading, Would want to take computer science classes as well.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2082706-bio-coding-language-makes-it-easier-to-hack-living-cells/
So bio coding is not a major he can major in.
Bioinformatics is a major at a few colleges, but mostly its a masters degree program at schools like Georgia Tech.
Students that want to get into bioinformatics, which includes other math techniques beyond bio coding, including a lot of statistics to analyze cancer data or figure out the human genome, or come up with new cures for cancer.
To get a masters degree in bioinformatics, he can major in physics, or chemistry or biology and double major with math and or computer science.
It depends on the school, which path works best. So at U of Colorado Boulder, the applied mathematics major in engineering often leads to a PhD in bioinformatics at CU Anshutz our medical school campus. that offers PhDs in bioinformatics.
Math is a very strong major for a premedical student and could lead to any of these quantitative biology careers.
Also take computer science classes. Math and CS are the best two majors along with physics for a premedical student today, due to the increasing need for measurement science in medicine, and the biophysics math that may cure cancer !
Biophysics is another interesting major, that leads to these careers too. So undergrad major in physics, do research in biophysics.
No high school student has access to System Verilog, but he can certainly read up on bio coding.
System Verilog costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per seat, takes a year or two to learn to use,
and would not be something a high school kid could learn easily. Many colleges do NOT have access
to system verilog to learn bio coding, so check on the university resources.
Bio coding is not something you can do with a laptop. You need to have access to a very sophisticated
electrical engineering tool, thats used by Intel, AMD, and other circuit design corporations, and some universities
will teach that tool in an electrical engineering curriculum.
Note that Stanford and Rice University are working on bio Coding. Its a very advanced biology/electrical engineering collaboration, so would need a college that offers this type of research work. Otherwise, wait until he gets a PhD to work on this, in graduate school, at a small number of schools. The average public flagship school may not have an effort in bio coding, but check at each EE/Biology program to see if they mention this new field of computer science.
It could, as you suggest be under BME, EE, biology, applied math, or computer science, so it will take some digging to figure out which universities are working on bio coding using system Verilog.
Thank you all. Reason for my question is mostly related to summer. Is it worthwhile doing a camp on Biocoding for a week if one is doing BME in high school as a course.
Is he interested? Will it displace something he’d rather do? If the answers are yes and no respectively, why not? If he’s not particularly interested though and just wants to hang out spending his summer being a kid, that’s ok too. That opportunity goes away way too fast as we always are looking forward and forgetting to be in the present.