What does it take to be a genetic engineer?

The equipment and materials for this sort of thing are quite expensive. Assuming that all you want to modify is bacteria and that you are content with cutting and pasting existing sequences from one type of bacteria into another (pretty much the simplest useful form of genetic engineering), you are going to need a centrifuge, a microcentrifuge, incubators (both shaking and still versions), a sterile hood, a set of micropipettes, glassware, access to an autoclave, access to a sequencing lab, various reagents for growing cultures and performing digests and ligations and analyses thereof, a decent computer with the relevant software, digest and ligation enzymes, a minus 20C freezer, a minus 80C freezer, antibiotics, competent cells, DNA extraction kits, electrophoresis apparatus, a gel dock for photographing your electrophoresis gels, a PCR machine, and lots and lots of consumables starting with but not limited to oodles of eppendorf tubes and micropipette tips. That's just off the top of my head, I'm definitely forgetting some things. We're talking mid six figures, easily -- this kind of equipment is the sort of thing that a university lab would have amassed over decades and would tend carefully over the years so as to avoid having to replace anything more quickly than necessary. Much of it would typically be shared between several labs in order to split costs. It's all utterly standard microbiology lab equipment, but that doesn't mean it's cheap. Oh, also you would need at least three or four other people to work with you, because this kind of stuff doesn't get done by just one person -- you need other people to share the work of babysitting reactions, helping to troubleshoot malfunctioning procedures and equipment, etc. It's a job for a team, rather than a solo operator. As far as the knowledge, well, I'm about to begin Year Four of my undergraduate career in more or less exactly this sort of thing, and Year Three of working in labs that perform these sorts of operations as the bread and butter of their research, and I still wouldn't really be able to design the experiments from scratch. I mean, I can execute all of the required procedures and make rational adjustments and analyze the results on my own most of the time, but as far as choosing what to do and why I would be totally in the weeds, out of my depth almost immediately. (That's what grad school will hopefully clear up for me.) And I definitely haven't made anything useful, unless you count an E. coli strain that expresses a fluorescent protein normally found in cyanobacteria as useful. Which actually it might be down the line if that lab ever gets its bilin-based FRET system working to a degree that it becomes a useful alternative to GFP-based FRET in some other research lab somewhere. Seriously, if you want to get into this stuff I highly recommend going back to school rather than trying to be self-taught. For one, you're not going to save time teaching yourself -- there is a ton of stuff to learn and I promise you you'll save time if you go to school and get some experienced people to teach it to you. It's frustrating to start at the bottom with Biology 101, but Biology 101 is actually a fascinating course if it's taught even semi-competently, so there's that to look forward to. It's a fun field to be in (as long as you have a high tolerance for tedium and failure) and you totally can get into it if you are willing to put in the time and jump through the hoops. But the state of genetic engineering research is such that these days not only is its practice pretty inaccessible to the autodidact, there's also no opportunity in the field for people who don't have formal degrees in the subject. No jobs, that is to say. You can totally get a job as a lab technician with a four-year bachelor degree though, doing the work of genetic engineering, and I bet that at least some of your E.E. training would carry over and save you maybe a year or so, and maybe even would allow you to develop a useful cross-disciplinary specialization down the line. Plus if you want an in on the industry, that's where you'll get your initial contacts. Also biology is freakin' fascinating and you might be like me and fall absolutely in love with a branch of the field totally other from that which you initially thought you wanted to go into it for. So sorry to burst your bubble of becoming an independent, self-taught genetic engineer, but don't give up hope! Find a good state school near you and enroll half-time in a biology program. Try it for a semester and see if you're still interested. I bet you will be, because like I said it's fucking fascinating stuff and it's amazing both how much there is to know and how much we just don't know yet. People doing genetic engineering are very much still working out on the edge of what is possible, where the things that we try fail nine times out of ten and that tenth time is, at best, just a tiny incremental step in the right direction. It's still extremely exciting to be the first person to learn some tiny thing that literally nobody else on earth knows yet. I highly recommend it.

Biohacking looks fun, but I don't think it's a particularly direct route to "making organisms better suited for humanity." You could engineer some bacteria tomorrow, probably the only thing you'd need to buy would be a basic incubator, but if you're talking about plants, animals, algae, it gets complicated fast. I have inserted bacterial DNA into frog embryos and created tadpoles with glowing green hearts. It was a lot of work and I needed a lot of help. I used equipment like $100,000 ultracentrifuges and also stuff like a $60 aquarium pump and needles I made myself by stretching glass tubes through a bunsen burner flame. Frogs are pretty easy because their eggs are squishy and numerous. In general I don't think genetic engineering on eukaryotes is really a solo project - it requires a lot of different kinds of expertise.

The term you're looking for is "http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/08/mf_diylab/". There are definitely people doing this.

Take a look at http://igem.org/Main_Page.

I'm not a genetic engineer, but I have a few friends who either work in genomic research or are trying to. It seems extremely competitive for those with advanced degrees from schools that have top programs. I also have some friends who do IT support for companies that build lab equipment for genomic research. That work seems much easier to get, and may be a better match for your EE background. I wouldn't want to get into DIY genetic engineering without a very good understanding of safety best practices. Chemistry done wrong can http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxygen_difluoride, and cells are basically little chemical factories.

If you limit yourself to bacteria and maybe yeast, you might be able to pull it off at that budget, but I don't think you will be able to do anything significant with more complex organisms. Mammalian cell culture can get very expensive (for example, look at the price of fetal bovine serum and consider that a typical mammalian cell culture will have 10% FBS plus lots other expensive ingredients - you will need many liters). There is also the cost of things like a tissue culture hood (not really required for bacteria), incubator, etc. And that's just for the cell culture: DNA manipulation/analysis will require a whole other set of tools. Some background: I have genetically engineered bacteria, mammalian cells, and viruses, but not yeast.

I don't think you want to try to do the laboratory stuff on your own. You don't know how to use it, you don't know what you need. I think you want to prepare for a job which is a stepping stone to where you want to be. In short: you need 1-1 advice from someone in the field. Scientists get these emails all the time, and as long as they are concise and full of enthusiasm you have a high chance of getting a response. Have you heard of iGEM? (igem.org) Given your EE background, it seems like an awesome goal for you. Find someone on one of the teams, maybe connected to your alma mater. It's possible they would be able to mentor you, but at the very least they can list some textbooks.

Oh and if you want to make jury-rigged equipment and use cheap, sub-standard reagents then you really have to have a solid understanding of what the equipment and reagents do. The thing about the expensive stuff that gets used in real research labs is that all you have to do to get it to work (assuming that what you are trying to do is something that can be done, which in research is never a given) is basically follow instructions very, very meticulously. If you are doing it the cheap way then you really have to know what you are doing because it's not going to want to work unless you can sort of coax everything into alignment which requires a solid grasp of the theory behind the procedures that you are doing.

You can definitely set up a home lab with your budget - someone I know has done something similar and I, a university lab-based scientist, have been amazed at what they have been able to buy online, and how cheap it has been (open source PCR machine for $600! fantastic little light microscope for $150!) Those of us in traditional labs are paying through the nose for some of the stuff we buy! So I don't think your budget is an issue, so much as your time. The person I know who has started this home lab, who is coming from a similar background as you, and thus is also self taught re: biological/biomedical science, has been spending a lot more than 10-12 hours per week on the work. One other point, you will need access to scientific and medical journal articles for you to learn more about this area. An affiliation with a university, through which you can access these articles, would be almost essential. Google scholar and PubMed provide the databases, but not all the articles you will need will have the full text available freely online. Good luck! Twelve months ago I would have posted a similar answer to Scientist's, but after seeing someone do something like this, and with much success, I would say that it is worth a shot!