The barrier of entry to biology is artificially high due to all sorts of reasons, mostly regulatory. Biohacking is often frowned upon on the federal level and the equipment is expensive. Even with stuff like OpenTrons, we are talking about several magnitudes higher costs than e.g. Arduino and a breadboard kit. What exists of open biology is often tied up with drug culture, both the legal and illegal variety. The latter needs no explanation and the former is stuff like Four Thieves Vinegar that tries to break the FDA-endorsed establishment. It is an embarrassment to the field that what exists of amateur biology mostly stands in the shadow of illegitimacy.

The pioneer of Crispr application in humans has just been thrown into jail and vilified in the press. Most of the scientific community, while not publicly praising, are silently in agreement with the decision. The few condemnations comes from bioengineers, your classic biologists are more than happy to play the "wait and see" game. Nobody is willing to actually engage with society at large with regards to the issue. There is no Space X, there is no Google in biology. Your established pharmaceutical companies are more than happy to play gatekeeper and rent-seek instead of shattering regulatory capture. They are not interested in pushing back the state, they would rather play the revolving door game. How many "prominent" biologists have you heard of whom built a single company that achieved unicorn status? Look at the biology "entrepreneurs". Classic academia-private partnerships. There is no fresh blood, no vision, no Tesla. More public relations effort is being put into "immortality tech" companies like Ambrosia and Calico than existing state of the art technologies. Apparently it is more "publicly acceptable" to inject young people's blood into your veins to live longer than to perform an experimental procedure on infants to potentially cure HIV.

Your average university graduate with a degree in the sciences can finish their biology component through memorization. This is the way the current system is structured and it is not likely to change soon. The talent in biology that does not go to medical school is being lost to software engineering. It is easier to make money in ad-tech than trying to cure cancer. Why bother working in the field when "shipping" can take decades because of red tape and experiments on non-human mamallian animals are tightly-regulated till almost the point of uselessness? Agriculture gets more leeway with animals on an unimaginably large scale and magnitude than your average university lab. Lab-on-chips and organoids are great for press releases and glossy magazine covers, but they are far from production-quality. Even lab-grown meat is not production-quality yet. The mush you get isn't even worth putting into meatballs, forget lab-grown filet mignons. The current tech is essentially the same old rehash on plant protein, bean curd/tofu has been used to make vegetarian meat substitutes in places like Asia for centuries. Impossible food made it "hip". To translate it into HN-speak: Impossible Foods to vegetarian meat is what Docker is to BSD jails. The tech community is able to reason through the costs and benefits of backdoors in encryption, but when it comes to animal rights there is nothing but emotional-fueled hysteria about perceived abuse and mistreatment. The next time a family member suffers in hospital from an incurable disease, just remember the donation you made to the local animal rights campaign helped hinder biological research and development by decades. Let's hope the animals' "thoughts and prayers" are with you. After all, they certainly are conscious enough to benefit from legal protections and funding.

You lament about the state of public biological understanding? Talk to the powers that be. How many people believe in free energy and try to put it into practice? Perpetual motion machines are easily debunked. You don't see rampant exploitation of the ignorant and vulnerable by free energy believers on the same scale as the anti-vaccination movement. The same can't be said for biology. How many craft beer brewers actually understand what goes on inside? The next time you go to your local bar, ask around. That will give a pretty clear idea of what is the current level of biology education.

Edit: why the downvotes? If biology makes you uncomfortable, then take time to learn it. After all, isn't this the infamous HN response to a lot of problems? "Learn to code"?