What kind of academia are you talking about? You probably won't be able to raise enough money to make a proper life-science research grant. You would be shock

What kind of academia are you talking about? You probably won't be able to raise enough money to make a proper life-science research grant. You would be shocked how fast money goes, even if you are super thrifty with it. As an example, I used one gram of a particular reagent each week. One gram of this compound costs $200. I ran that experiment for almost a year, once per week. That's $10k for a single reagent. If you factor in all the other costs of the experiment (culture media, weekly rat, tissue culture plates, poly-l-lysine for coating plates, nitrocellulose for blotting, antibodies for westerns (going at $600 for 50uL), assorted reagents, etc etc ad nauseum), the price of my single experiment for a year skyrockets into easily $20k. That's one technician, working on one part of one tiny paper, working on one insignificant detail of how the human brain works. Life-sciences is downright, stupidly expensive. Edit: Sorry, that came across sounding curmudgeonly and bitter. Any lab would be thrilled to receive an extra $20k in funding - it would help pay for a technician to run an experiment. Just be warned going into it that you will be making a very tiny dent in how things work.