Why ? Flashback to '78 when the term was coined maybe, but since roughly 2004 there has been an enormous acceleration in the amount of funds that are poured into this field.
Right now a large number of companies is actively building solutions to deal with enormous amounts of genetic data, pattern matching (see the various iterations of 'blast'), very rapid sequencing (a complete human genome now in about 14 days, possibly already faster).
Nanotech is still in its infancy in comparision, and major breakthroughs in nano machinery seem to be forever about 10 years in to the future (a bit like real A.I.).
since roughly 2004 there has been an enormous acceleration in the amount of funds that are poured into this field.
Really? Because I left the field in 2004 partially because funding was drying up.
Some of the big ideas in bioinformatics are interesting but most of the grunt work is not very interesting or fun. And, the "bioinformaticist" on the team is the one responsible for the grunt work. The actual work is mostly 1990s style java, perl and visual basic programming.
Maybe things have significantly changed over the past five years but I doubt it since I've hired a number of refugees from various biopharm firms.
Bioinformatics only caught on around 1999/2000. When I got into the industry there were very few people who knew their way around, especially from the programming side.
I've done a lot of nano over the years (before I ever did bio), and there is a lot out there, but nano in the nanomachine sense is still a pipedream and will be for a long time (IMHO).
On the funding side, the funds are there for sequencing, Genome Wide Association Studies, etc. Bioinformatics is part of that effort, and critical, but not directly what the funds are for
