nodalpoint.org

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/of_books_in_neurobiology.php

I should probably comment, as the desperate guy :)

If I understand correctly, you're looking for examples of people from a computer science background who moved into biology and now run a laboratory. I don't know any - but I'm sure that they exist.

What's far more common is that people start with a biological background then become "computer guys", either through necessity (noone else wants the job) or choice (it's more fun than lab work) or a combination of the two. Many of those people go on to run their own labs and many of them have been named here.

In terms of career development, both routes have their problems. There are of course a few purely computational research groups but they are quite rare in any country. Remember that on average, scientists achieve research independence in their early forties and bioinformatics as we know it today is still not much more than 10 years old. So most tenured researchers in bioinformatics already have a pretty good record as wet lab researchers. This is certainly the case with the IMB here in Queensland for example. Most of the group leaders there were already established in cell biology, genetics, biochemistry and so on. For them, increased interest in bioinformatics has come at a fortuitous time as they can run labs with a bioinformatics component, but very much applied to wetlab work.

For those of us who are a little younger and enjoy bioinformatics, things are a little more difficult. If you get out of the lab and into computational work before you settle on your pet biological system, people just don't understand where you're coming from. They ask about your research interests, expecting a snappy one-line answer like "ageing" or "metalloproteins" or "fruit fly development", when what you're interested in is simply biological data. How to acquire it, store it, analyse it and present it. So there's the dilemma. Successful career scientists run a wetlab with a single focus, to which bioinformatics can be applied. Young, would-be successful career scientists love applying the bioinformatics but don't have a strong, single wetlab focus. Result: they don't understand each other very well.

All I can suggest is that if it's research success in academia that you crave, find a focused biological problem that (a) offers sufficient computational interest for you, (b) offers the chance for you to run a wetlab even if you don't necessarily want to work in it and (c) lets you apply for funding on terms that other biologists and grant bodies can understand ("my aim is to cure disease X" or whatever). Failing that, hope for a staff scientist position to come up in a field where you can use your bioinformatics (such as a sequencing centre). And failing that, just get any old job that involves programming - sysadmin, telecommunications, website design. Won't be as much fun as science though.

How "wet" is wet? Lots of labs do PCR, RT-PCR, sequencing for both validating computational predictions and collecting data for studies. Are you talking about someone who switched fields or someone who does both?

Michael Brent apparently has a wet lab now to test computational predictions. He made his way quite well in CS and computational linguistics before focusing on computational genomics and gene prediction.

Michael Eisen runs a successful lab using and developing computational approaches and doing lots of wet stuff in flies, yeasts, and even frogs (and frog killing fungi).

Chris Burge, Steven Brenner, and Todd Lowe (among others) have both a "wet" and "dry" component to their labs for both validation of computational predictions and generating new data regarding splicing among other things.

Just some folks I could think of off top of my head, I am sure there are many others -- this seems has a gender and nationality bias to it.