[Odenwaelder]

1) Not enough for starting a biotech startup as OP would like to do. Having a PhD means that you've spent years on a certain subject. You cannot just read a book and be up to speed on biomedical research and CRISPR.

2) Having hands-on experience in wet labs is useful and relatively easy to learn. People can learn wet lab skills sufficient to carry out experiments (i.e. pipetting stuff together) in under a year. This is not what research is about though.

3) True

4) You don't need a PhD. But to truly succeed in biology, you need to learn things from the ground up, which takes years of studying. If you just read a few books, you will be able to understand certain parts of it, but as a founder of a biotech startup, you will be the equivalent of a tech startup founder blindly following buzzwords such as "blockchain".

[iongoatb]

Never recommended just "reading a book" - although books are for knowledge transfer. In fact, I recommended the exact opposite. Creating or joining a lab to do DIY genetic engineering is not pipetting. Anyone can easily obtain the materials to do CRISPR and implement various ideas they get from reading the latest research and literature. It is exactly analogous to the computer and internet revolution. All of those founders learned things from the ground up, often outside of academia, while others were completing academic research. The truth is that the same opportunity is now available to biotech and genetic engineering. The odin project, for example (I am not affiliated in any way whatsoever), offers all the materials to build your own home DIY bio engineering lab. That is certainly enough to do the required research and test / validate various research ideas, and ultimately creating a startup.

[fabian2k]

Just taking a quick look at the DIY stuff, that only seems to cover the initial genetics experiments. The equipment offered on the Odin project sites doesn't really cover what comes after that.

What do you do after you introduced a plasmid or modified the genome of some bacteria?

[pkpkpk2]

RE: "Having a PhD means that you've spent years on a certain subject. You cannot just read a book and be up to speed on biomedical research and CRISPR."

Isn't that what books are for? To compile, document and share knowledge some people spent years to figure out?

[Odenwaelder]

There is a huge gap between having knowledge from books and being able to do original research, let alone solving a biomedical niche problem using CRISPR. This gap is usually filled with an advanced degree, where you spend years in the lab, keep track of the latest research in the field, try to find your niche and solve the actual problem.

I mean, by all means, try it. But life sciences are not computer science. The approach is entirely different and quality of the work you need to do is different. It looks much, much easier than it is. (Which is, on a different note, why I believe the whole pseudoscience crap such as anti-vaxxers is gaining so much traction)

[mindcrime]

You cannot just read a book and be up to speed on biomedical research and CRISPR.

FWIW, the OP didn't specifically say ze wanted to do "biomedical". Biotech is bigger than just medical applications. Biotech could skew more towards materials science, or environmental engineering, or any number of areas besides "treatment for diseases in humans" or whatever.