>>13512949more replies from the same guy in that thread:
>If I want to get properly involved in this sort of thing should I look for open source projects or something? Or is grad school my only option if I really want to participate?Unfortunately, the formal route is the easiest path in if you don't know anybody. Not to say that it's impossible to contribute meaningfully all on your lonesome, but it's orders of magnitudes harder and slower.
If you just want to dick around with existing data on your own, by all means do it. There's exabytes of it out there, and there's nothing stopping you from having at it yourself. Image analysis, metabolomics, sequencing, crystal structures, whatever. And it's all free. I'm most familiar with the various nucleotide and peptide sequence repositories, and there's a fair amount of information and documentation for getting at it. I'm assuming that you're competent in some high level scripting language if you have a math/physics background.
If you're a competent computer scientist and want to contribute to making the actual tooling, there's 1000's of open source projects out there that need contributors.