For those who are interested in this space, I'd strongly recommend first looking at options outside of your home. If you're in the bay area, here's a hacker/ma

For those who are interested in this space, I'd strongly recommend first looking at options outside of your home. If you're in the bay area, here's a hacker/maker space for biology: http://biocurious.org/ http://biocurious.org/ If you're not, you could investigate joining an iGEM team. It's an annual synthetic biology competition, where competitors engineer biological "machines" and are encouraged to factor their work into standard, reusable biological components, called BioBricks (see: http://parts.igem.org/Catalog http://parts.igem.org/Catalog). I participated for some time in college, and it was really exciting and I was able to contribute via mathematical/in silica modeling with only a handful of undergraduate biology courses under my belt. If you're set on your own biohacking space, you're going to need to get some equipment. A non-exhaustive list of what you'll likely need in no particular order, are: reaction vessels, pipettes + tips, plates + medium, incubators, autoclave, fridge/freezer, restriction enzymes & ligase, electrophoresis chamber + gel, PCR machine + polymerase, centrifuge, microscope, and of course, some e. coli. Please do your research and if you don't have lab experience or are uncertain about something, find someone who has worked in a lab to help you. Most of this stuff isn't as scary as it seems, but if you mishandle the equipment&chemicals, you can do real damage, to yourself, to property, and to the environment. It's not something you should "move fast and break things" with.