Astronomy has long been heading in this direction, actually - it's a leading indicator for where fields like medicine and biotechnology are going. People can today do useful and novel life science work for a few tens of thousands of dollars, and open biotechnology groups are starting to formalize (such as biocurious in the Bay Area).
There is a lot of good science and good application of science that can be parallelized, broken up into small fragments, distributed amongst collaborative communities. The SENS Foundation's discovery process for finding bacterial species that might help in attacking age-related buildup of lipofuscin, for example: cheap, could be very parallel. In this, these forms of work are much like software development - consider how that has shifted in the past few decades from the varied enclosed towers to the open market squares below.
This greater process is very important to all of us, as it is necessary to speed up progress in fields that have great potential, such as biotechnology. Only a fraction of what could be done will be done within our lifetimes without a great opening of funding and data and the methodologies of getting the work done.