I do cancer research. You're right, the technical skills for basic wet lab stuff are not hard to learn. The hard part of cancer research is not learning how to

I do cancer research. You're right, the technical skills for basic wet lab stuff are not hard to learn. The hard part of cancer research is not learning how to pipette, it's learning how to ask and investigate worthwhile questions. Experimental design is subtle and requires wide ranging knowledge of sources of biological and technical confounders. Growing cells might be easy, but do you know how to debug a fluorescence microscopy experiment; in fact, do you even know how to recognize that it needs to be debugged? This is stuff you can learn over the course of a few years in a phd program, but it takes longer to become a true expert. Finally, what do you investigate? Cancer? What tissue type, which cell type, which proteins, DNA structures, or RNA structures are most important and least understood? Just absorbing a small fraction of the literature so that you don't ask stupid or boring questions is a lifelong task.