Yeah you’re right. My point is that the technical bar for entry is low, and can be attained maybe by spending one year in a top lab. You then skip the hazing ritual that is the PhD and postdoc and directly start your own small lab.

Spend your money attending conferences to make connections and get yourself updated in the field.

Hire technicians to help with your grunt work. Spend your days reading research papers, discussing science at conferences, and setting up new experiments.

The bar for doing some experiments, in an environment with tons of logistical, technical, and intellectual support, is indeed pretty low. A high school student could certainly learn to run a gel in a week or two; patching a neuron might take a few months.However, the physical "act" of collecting data, especially in the happy case where all of the conditions have been worked out and the results look "as expected", is a very small part of being a scientist.

More often, you are trying something that hasn't been done before and you're getting results that don't quite make sense. Here, experience and background knowledge seem key, and I'm not sure that you'll pick up much of that in a year, even in a "top lab" because experiments are slow. On top of that, you'll need to learn how to design experiments and analyze/present their results in ways that your peers find convincing, which is in itself a non-trivial skill. All this presumes that you're even able to find your way into a "top lab", but that's not a foregone conclusion either: these places can be incredibly selective even among people with a decade of experience in the same field.

Put another way, your answer assumes there's a lot of fat to trim in the PhD/postdoc stages. What is it and can it really be cut down by 90% as you propose?

Long postdocs are a modern phenomenon due to the oversupply of biomedical researchers. Historically people did shorter PhDs and skipped postdocs. There are stories of old timers saying they got their faculty position based on just one or two papers, unthinkable these days.

If you’re independently wealthy, you don’t need to go through the modem hazing ritual and you can start your own lab much earlier.

I’m not saying you can start immediately and be an effective researcher, you will initially suck like everyone else. But you will have a better time learning how to fail if your career/livelihood is not on the line.