I am a biologist forced to do some programming (I have some experience with R and VBA)

You might want to look for an IDE that has hooks for both R and Perl. Eclipse, WinEdt, and emacs are the options that come to mind. If you go with Eclipse, see StatET; for WinEdt, see the R-WinEdt package; for emacs, see ESS.

That said, I haven't found anything that's great for both programs. I use emacs for R and Komodo IDE for Perl and switch back and forth all the time. (If you want to try Komodo IDE and are in academia, ask about the educational discount, which is very substantial.)