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.

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