Bohdan Khomtchouk, Edi Weitz, and Claes Wahlestedt have an interesting paper that argues for the use of Common Lisp in bioinformatics and computational biology. Lispers will recognize Weitz from his many contributions of outstanding Lisp packages, including the unrivaled CL-PPCRE for regular expressions.
The paper makes the case for why Common Lisp is an excellent choice for developing software in bioinformatics and computational biology. Oddly, though, you could apply those same arguments to most fields, an indication of how flexible and useful Lisp can be for developing serious software.
The authors believe that the biology/Lisp community is set to take off and expect that it will soon reach critical mass. Those of us who are Lispers can only hope that’s true. In any event, if you’re a Lisper or wondering why you should become one, take a look at the paper; it gives plenty of reasons and you don’t have to know anything about biology to follow their arguments.