I have trained many students to do biology, and I can teach anybody, without any education, to perform molecular biology experiments in 2 weeks.
I 2 months, they are usually able to generate scientifically valid ideas for research (although, usually not the best ideas).
Biology is extremely simple as a field, and a computer scientist will have no problem getting into the field (while opposite is usually hard)
I vehemently disagree with the claim that biology is a simple field, and I'm especially surprised to hear this from someone who did work in this field for 11 years. Anyone who has taken an intro biochem class would back me up on this: life is complicated!
Regarding your second paragraph: I was fortunate to work in 3 fields in my scientific career: organic chemistry, materials science/organic semiconductors and molecular (synthetic) biology. This gave me ability to compare. What I found out, is that biology has the most interesting problems nowadays, and biology day-to-day work is extremely, outrageously, ridiculously stupid. I can not even start describing how amazingly debilitating molecular biology methods are. Right now, in the middle of the night I am stuck in the lab doing a day-and-half long protocol, all consisting on steps like "put liquid in", "pipette liquid out", "incubate for 5 minutes" and "shake for half hour".
Now here I am, after 15 years of school, 5 years of PhD and 11 years after that, doing work which is less intellectual than flipping burgers in McDonalds.
Fortunately, the fact that biology is so simple, gives me hope that it can be automated fairly easily, which I am planning to concentrate on for the next 5 years.
Please don't mix the plain complexity of life, which appears like "too many things to memorize", and complexity of mathematics and computer science, which is "understanding deep layers of abstractions". While I haven't taken intro bio classes, I read books and tons of papers. They are just plainly simple, you don't need brain to read them, you only need to memorize.
And if you don´t mind me asking, what´s the best way to start a little home experiment to see if one may actually be interested in biotech?
In general, biologists are very busy pipetting faster than their peers, so they can secure scarce professorship positions. They simply have no time taking step back and looking at more general picture.
People who have skills necessary to build a robot and understand biology, have opportunity to work for companies that pay salaries 5 times higher than academia pays, so they don't bother.
I would not recommend doing any home experiments, especially without professional laboratory experience. Most of the experiments contain dangerous, poisonous or potentially explosive chemicals, and as for a newcomer, the risk is too high.
Instead, I would recommend finding a local biotech interest group, join them and go from there. Alternatively, you can find a local biotech lab and volunteer to help a grad student or postdoc with their project. This is more common than anyone may think. This way, there are no obligations, and you can leave if you don't like it; at the same time, you will get exposure to the state of the art biology.
Again, don't be afraid that you will not be able to bring anything good; biology as a science is ridiculously simple, and if you already have CS or electrical engineering background, you will have no trouble catching up within a month or two (that is how long it takes to our grad students who come from non-biology background to start bringing in new valid scientific ideas).
Btw, I work 50 hours a week plus travel, I don't think it's going to be that fast to get up to speed.
Cheers
You're convoluting the simplicity of each step of an experiment with the level of complexity of the field itself. Memorization is a crucial component, but if you believe that's all there then you are severely underestimating the study of life. It would be like claiming that since CS can be boiled down to 0's and 1's that it is therefore a simple field of study.