[Engineer2 (OP)]

I have a degree in integrated mechanical and electrical engineering but work as a software engineer. I taught myself programming skills way beyond my course and I now work as a software engineer alongside people who studied computer science. I am more of a practical learner. I learn by doing, not by just reading over and over things. I want to use my programming skills to write programs to solve genetic problems and actually do some genetic engineering as soon into the learning process as I can. I want to teach myself virology ( thinking gene theropy) and microbiology in some of my spare time. My objective is to try my own hand at the aging problem. In a place away from corps who might think helping people live longer is unethical. I know of individuals who were detered from it and had their research stopped for this reason. Anyway any advice on good sources of information for me to learn quickly and how can I go about leanring genetic engineering practically. I'm up for creating my own equipment if necessary. I have very good programming skills. Biological machines are so wonderful and fascinating and I want to play with them Right now I have an A grade a level in biology but that's it.

[yellowcat]

For learning virology there is a very good series of lectures on Youtube:

Also the podcasts This Week in Virology and This Week in Microbiology

There are several online courses that you may find useful.
http://study.com/articles/List_of_Free_Online_Microbiology_Courses_and_Training_Options.html

https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/computational-biology

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/systems-biology