> I think there's a difficulty in that you can't just do biology from your garage, even bioinformatics.

Yes. Studying biology is like reverse-engineering extremely complex, constantly changing microscopic systems which developed over thousands of years. Molecular biology in particular is prohibitively expensive. It's just not something people can play with the same way we play with computer programming. A fully equipped laboratory is required to perform even the most basic experiments. Even more resources are required in order to produce original work.

This also causes difficulty in reproducing published results. It's easy to verify that the laws of physics hold true. It's not so easy to reproduce an expensive 10 year long double blind clinical trial.