Just a note regarding cancer research. I'm a developer and have been to a number of conferences. The one I enjoyed the most was almost unrelated to computers - cancer research and systems biology conference. It was an amazing experience to see how much it was similar to a dev meetup. How everything you thought you knew about cancer and what people know about it (do they?) is gone now. It was great to see how cancer research has it's own mini-universe of startups, academia, corporations and simple jobs inside the larger academia container. An eye-opening experience I would really recommend. (just take a friend who can translate some crazy expressions to programmer-acceptable language)