Most of my career has been working on enabling technologies in high performance computing so that people with a stronger science background and more patience can do their thing in computational chemistry, bioinformatics, drug design, CFD, weather/climate, things that go boom, things that shall not be named, etc. It's kinda indirect, but it's cool when you come up with a speedup that allows someone to run efficiently on a 128 node cluster when before the scaling was dropping off at 16 or 32 nodes.

I don't know what's going to come of the bioinformatics stuff I'm doing. Right now, I'm just doing it because I get off on learning new stuff. Maybe job N+1 will be working in the guts of one of the many tools out there. It's a crazy time right now. The impossible of a few years ago is now routine. I haven't watched that kind of change since computing/networking 25 years ago. But I expect I'll continue to labor in the background trying to make the revolution a little faster, easier, or a little less buggy.

As for biotech itself, I can easily see it being targeted towards solving many of the things you mentioned - for example, creating more salt tolerant plants, or even better, plants that sequester the salt. Ditto for low water irrigation, desert recovery, better biodiesel crops, heavy metal removal, etc.