Bioinformatician here: First of all, I think it's got to be clear that a lone bioinformatician, or even a group of them isn't going to go about changing the world. Essentially, when you sign up for this, you're still a cog in a machine, albeit a slightly more altruistic machine.
Here's my pet peeve in bioinformatics - If there's one thing that's poorly suited to science, it's the building of computational infrastructure. We're talking basic stuff like databases, tools etc. Sure, anyone can knock out a bit of code for a basic database, but the big problem is that there's no incentive to have decent code, or maintain it so that it lasts any longer than the person is in the lab, or has funding. So, what will be great is if existing resources are cleaned up - data is normalised and pulled out so that it is actually accessible for doing some kind of analysis on it.
If you want to do bigger work, do something actually novel, or that has any biological relevance there's no getting around collecting your own data (e.g. sequencing the crap out of a bunch of things). I'm in the process of trying to get funding now for a project of mine to make that very leap now.
I'm sure someone working on next gen sequencing (the new hotness) can pipe up with the big problems to be solved there.
I know a professor who has a big grant to sequence a whole bunch of animals, and will also do a high res CT scan of each specimen. He plans to make a comprehensive site where scientists and school children can access the data they are interested and learn more.
He even has money for a dev position for 4 years, I'm just worried that he gets someone who slaps together a proprietary and incompatible site when this would be a perfect chance to experiment with implementing some standard data access APIs.
I've heard bioinformatics people complain about the lack of standards and fragmented nature that comes from various small groups of scientists doing it on their own.
If anyone is interested pm me and I'll put you in touch, he is in South Carolina so he can't offer the salary and other perks of the Bay, but it's a real chance to put good development energy into science.
This is a problem that is pretty endemic to acadamia in general. The revolving door of most academic labs means a lot of knowledge and tools are lost or not maintained. It is frustrating to see this happen in every single lab, but short of fixing the labor-mill mentality of acadamia, this will never go away.
You don't always have to get new data to make a splash. I particularly like this project (it's in neuroscience but similar things probably exist in biology)
Here's my pet peeve in bioinformatics - If there's one thing that's poorly suited to science, it's the building of computational infrastructure. We're talking basic stuff like databases, tools etc. Sure, anyone can knock out a bit of code for a basic database, but the big problem is that there's no incentive to have decent code, or maintain it so that it lasts any longer than the person is in the lab, or has funding. So, what will be great is if existing resources are cleaned up - data is normalised and pulled out so that it is actually accessible for doing some kind of analysis on it.
If you want to do bigger work, do something actually novel, or that has any biological relevance there's no getting around collecting your own data (e.g. sequencing the crap out of a bunch of things). I'm in the process of trying to get funding now for a project of mine to make that very leap now.
I'm sure someone working on next gen sequencing (the new hotness) can pipe up with the big problems to be solved there.