Want to become a genetic engineer.What should I do?

What would you major in in college if you want to become a genetic engineer?

• I'm in high school and I'm interested in genetic engineering. What would be the best thing to major in, how many years of school would it require, and what type of companies are looking to hire genetic engineers? would it be hard to get a job?

• Answer:

  Major in biology Although there has been a tremendous revolution in the biological sciences in the past twenty years, there is still a great deal that remains to be discovered. The completion of the sequencing of the human genome, as well as the genomes of most agriculturally and scientifically important plants and animals, has increased the possibilities of genetic research immeasurably. Expedient and inexpensive access to comprehensive genetic data has become a reality, with billions of sequenced nucleotides already online and annotated. Now that the rapid sequencing of arbitrarily large genomes has become a simple, if not trivial affair, a much greater challenge will be elucidating function of the extraordinarily complex web of interacting proteins, dubbed the proteome, that constitutes and powers all living things. Genetic engineering has become the gold standard in protein research, and major research progress has been made using a wide variety of techniques, including: