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1. 1. Humans can engineer random mutations to create a viable population. I'd bet a lot of those variations are just going to be immune factors (we can also engineer mono-culture like bananas, apples and lab mice if needed.) The world of genetic engineering post CRISPR is never going to be the same again.
2. 2. Humans, unlike every other species, has both the capacity and intention to craft a custom environment to ensure continence if not flourishing of a revived species (insert rants about the Zoo here.) Darwin built an ecology out of imported species on Ascension Island over a hundred years before Jurassic Park was filmed.
3. 3. There is limited time, space and ability to 'save' everything. We can save and store what we can. The common (incorrect) statement is that there are three widely used crops that feed the world but around 50,000 edible species of plants. Even if you could ensure a solid founder population with only 10 diverse seeds that's a half-million storage containers you have to manage. This is not even touching on how to preserve the gametes, blastulas or embryos of the animal kingdom.

As for the question of should one only has to consider the fossil record. If you do not learn how to bring the extinct back then the best you can hope is that someone somewhere stepped in the wrong sand pit and it currently leaving a really nice impression as they petrify.

I expect that once field ready PCR is available some kind of public Merkel tree of DNA codes should be assembled. (Insert DNAcoin cryptocurrency joke here.) Just the deltas need to be kept like in this "Git repository of code" the same way we do with human DNA records. It's a literal tree of life. Then the race is on to scan in everything you can before it dies.

After that it is just a matter of making tools that can turn the DNA back into living stuff. Now you have an instant backup of the planet's ecosystem, from bacteria and virii and molds to your neighbor Steve and his dog. Throw it in a can attached to a light sail. Stop worrying about the death of the Sun.

Start worrying about competing with other species that had the same idea and are about to show up on your doorstep.

http://www.broadinstitute.org/

Right now one of the easier fields to break into with only a Bachelors degree is bioinformatics and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA is always looking for programmers to come work for them in the various cancer research groups. As the others have already pointed out though, in research there is a ceiling in place if you don't have a Ph.D and realistically a research-based (i.e. thesis) Master's degree is going to be needed if you actually want to have career progression somewhere without having the Ph.D since there are enough people with them being graduated these days.

It sounds like you want to work with a scientific group as a programmer, not be doing your own independent research. If this is true there are a variety of positions out there. My experience is in life sciences and imaging. There are research institution like the Broad Institute http://www.broadinstitute.org/ or HHMI Janelia Farms http://www.janelia.org/ that staff a fair number of programmers. Also, many Universities have core imaging facilities and there may be similar types of facilities in other scientific areas.

There also a significant number of companies that do research. Bioinformatics is a big topic for example pharmaceutical companies so big data experience is important. There are plenty of biotech companies too, some are providing research, some are trying to develop profitable technologies such as new tools for discovery and bio fuel etc. A number of companies that provide instrumentation and software to do research. There are a number of large players, such as Thermo Scientific, GE and Dananaher companies such as ABSciex, Beckman and Coulter. Obviously any company will be profit driven, so you will have to decide whether it is for you, but the jobs will contribute to research one way or another.

My suggestion is to get some scientific journal in you field of interest. Look at the advertiser and institution that do interesting things. Then go the websites of these places and see what openings may be out there. If you find something really interesting in a research paper that clearly involves computing you should directly contact them and see if they are interested in hiring. Most researcher are interested in the research problem and don't want to spend all there time coding. Often they are not good at finding developers just like developers are not good at finding these small research position. They may welcome someone who is interested enough in their researcher to seek them out. They might also point you to someone who will.

Not for annotation, but for the initial alignment of NGS reads to the reference genome. BWA, Bowtie, and SOAP2 all use the Burrows-Wheeler transform, and are in common use. For variant calling and functional annotation we'd use other tools, e.g.:

http://www.broadinstitute.org/gsa/wiki/index.php/Best_Practice_Variant_Detection_with_the_GATK_v2

http://www.openbioinformatics.org/annovar/

Well, IGV seems to be partially a netbeans app - and I've been using that at work.

Other than that I'm not sure what's so hard about your project. Where I use to work had a museum, and they set something up something similar using multiple large flat-panels displays linked to one another with several remote controls for user interaction. If you contact them I'm sure they'd be willing to share some insights.

Other than that I'm not sure what's so hard about your project. Where I use to work had a museum, and they set something up something similar using multiple large flat-panels displays linked to one another with several remote controls for user interaction. If you contact them I'm sure they'd be willing to share some insights.