Here's where I think we need to be going: You go to a doctor's office, sick. 1) They take a blood sample. 2) They find the malignant bacteria and DNA sequence it. 3) If it's a known strain, they know what antibiotics to use on it. 4) If not, they solve protein folding on the genes. 5) From that, they see which existing antibiotics would kill it. 6) If none will, then given the proteins, they have to derive a new antibiotic.
1) is easy. 2) might not be - there can be a lot of things in a blood sample, and finding only the interesting (bad) things might not be simple. The sequencing part is pretty much solved. 3) would take a bit of work, but I think it's possible now. 4) we're getting there. 5) might have a fair amount in common with 3), but it probably takes some additional work. 6) is... probably non-trivial.
That's just one research agenda. There are others. You may have to move to related work, but I doubt you're going to be out of a job in this lifetime.
Basically sequence everything what's in your blood and look for what doesn't match your genome === infection. The problem is this is orders of magnitude more compute intense than whole genome sequencing. Basically increased demand for sequencing far outmatches available compute!
DNA sequencing is still slow and very expensive. On the scales you're talking about it's just not worth it.
I think I agree at a high-level that there is a huge reservoir of demand for this technology. But it's also possible that solving protein folding and similar research will simply cease to be a bottleneck for that demand, and people will be out of jobs.
1) is easy. 2) might not be - there can be a lot of things in a blood sample, and finding only the interesting (bad) things might not be simple. The sequencing part is pretty much solved. 3) would take a bit of work, but I think it's possible now. 4) we're getting there. 5) might have a fair amount in common with 3), but it probably takes some additional work. 6) is... probably non-trivial.
That's just one research agenda. There are others. You may have to move to related work, but I doubt you're going to be out of a job in this lifetime.