Surprised no one has mentioned CRISPR and gene editing technologies at large 7 hours after OP's submission.
I'm not a scientist (yet?) -- my experience in the field of computational biology is as an undergrad research fellow in an Ivy last summer. I have an engineering and Silicon Valley background. However, the field of computational biology, is probably if not the most exciting out there, at least in the top 5 (best of Silicon Valley included.) What we have achieved so far is tremendous. Understanding and sequencing the DNA. Finding out that there are coding and non-coding sequences in our DNA, i.e., sequences that encode (or not) proteins. Finding out that we can program on the DNA because the DNA is Turing-complete. Essentially, it's just another programming language. We just don't know all of its syntax and semantics yet. We're getting there, though. Finding out that coding DNA is the minority -- and non-coding DNA is actually equally (if not more) important because in the non-coding DNA there's the epigenome -- a complex chemical network that regulates how cells interpret the genome, i.e., the DNA. Think of it something like this: the DNA and the epigenome is like a symphony score and an orchestra. The symphony, the code, (the DNA) is always the same (differentiates between different organisms of course) but different orchestras play the same symphony differently. By understanding and manipulating the epigenome we're able to reverse engineer the genome and perform reversible cell mutations -- figure out why/how/when we create specific cells. Tackling disease.
We've only recently figured out that obesity, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, and schizophrenia, are after all, genetic diseases.
And then, there's CRISPR and gene editing. We're able to do live organism gene editing using this technology. We're able to create a DNA sequence in a lab, insert it in a cell, and using CRISPR and the Cas9 protein, “cut and paste” the new sequence. It's not market-ready (or cure-ready yet) but the lab applications are deeply impactful. The disease-curing effects will be monumental.