BioInformatics
Information technology plays a critical and increasing role in biology and medicine. In fact biology, especially genetics, is becoming computational. There are fewer beakers and pipettes and far more teraflops and terabytes. Even outside of genetics the sophistication of equipment for discovery, analysis and control has reached an advanced state. Presentations by leading biological scientists at MIT often include a discussion of their IT infrastructure.
There are a number of well-known and highly capitalized public companies in this space including Applied Biosystems, Illumina, and Affymetrix and a growing number of new companies like Helicos Biosciences trying to capture a piece of this rapidly growing market.
Beyond scientific areas the vast healthcare industry has started to benefit from improved technology for process automation, knowledge management, patient diagnosis and treatment. The companies working to change the business of healthcare are a varied group but include firms like PhaseForward (clinical trials), Athena Health (physician practices) and WebMD.