When he considered augmenting his internal medicine studies with a mathematics PhD in 1978, Mark Perlin, now chief executive officer of Cybergenetics, a Pittsburgh-based genomics software firm, didn't exactly receive encouraging words. “Computer science and mathematics are not, and never will be, relevant to medicine,” the dean of the University of Chicago told him then.

How times change. The path that Perlin chose over 20 years ago could be a template for today's bioinformatics professional. Perlin, who is also an adjunct faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, earned a PhD in mathematics from the City University of New York, an MD from the University of Chicago, and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University.

His decision to pursue mathematics and computer programming along with medicine seemed logical, not trail-blazing. “Math broadened my view of medicine, so it seemed natural to interrupt medical studies midway through and study math for three years,” he says.

He has no regrets now, but notes that some of that academic inflexibility that he faced initially still exists. “Biology is changing rapidly, but university departments are persistent forms, and rewards are distributed along department lines,” he says. Those boundaries stifle innovation: “I have more freedom for genomics research in a start-up company than in a university department.”

But earning that freedom didn't come easily. After medical school, he did a six-month postdoctoral stint at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, a one-year transitional medical residency in Pittsburgh, then joined the Carnegie-Mellon University faculty in computer science. While there, he earned a PhD in computer science, in the hope of embarking on an academic career.

But when he realized that academia could be “limiting”, he launched his own company. “I started Cybergenetics in 1994 because I had a sense that the private small business model might be a better way to innovate and do research.”