it is hard to be hired there. That creates relatively closed system where software is in the state that can significantly benefit even from short professional generic programmer involvement - at least it was on few occasions i or my friends happened to touch it.

With respect to open source work - the field is wide open. For example, as "data mining/big data" was mentioned, the interesting recent development synthesizing advances in general availability of cheap server farms (hardware and software -wise, in particular cloud/hadoop) and a new approach - "meta/shotgun sequencing" - enabled by such advances can be found here http://bowtie-bio.sourceforge.net/crossbow/index.shtml

Also may be interesting to look at http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/jcvi-cloud-biolinu...