Your best bet is probably to look for a co-founder with an MS or PHD in molecular biology rather than trying to get yourself to that level from the ground up. If you have some biology background and just want to understand the specifics of Crispr, you can start with this paper[0] and just google every term you aren't familiar with until you make it all the way through. If you don't know biology at all, this[1] is a common text book in undergrad programs for molecular/cellular biology.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23287718

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Bruce-Alberts/...

I personally really liked: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Systems-Biology-Mathemat...

These were the undergrad books I had on biology:

https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Bruce-Alberts/...

https://www.amazon.com/Biochemistry-Jeremy-M-Berg/dp/1464126...

If you like this book you will probably also like the gold standard for cellular biology: Molecular Biology of the Cell (http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-5th-Edition/dp/...).

It costs more but it's worth it. It's a deeply informative book that covers a large spectrum of topics that you can read without much background knowledge in biology. It's the same book your doctor or bioinformatics professional probably used in school learning about cellular biology.

...if you want to learn about the true beauty of viruses, learn about how they work, how their genetic code is written and "executed" to produce the simplest and smallest possible viable replicator (though not an independent replicator), grab a molecular virology textbook like [1] (it's not that hard - you can skim a more general molec bio book like [2], which is written in a style very friendly to all technically oriented people, including coders). Or check out a really cool virology blog - http://www.virology.ws/ (by one of the authors of book [1]), though latest posts are more about politics and social implications than cool basic science.

I have a feeling that von Newman would be extremely fascinated by modern molecular virology if he'd be alive today, considering his interest for minimal universal replicators [3]. If you think about it, modern computer science may very well owe its existence to von Newman's and Turing's interest in mathematical models of life itself!

(...if you want to learn more about the topic above, just google "von newman universal constructor" or "turing morphogenesis" or "schrodinger what is life" and start exploring, I don't want to spoil anyone's fun of finding out about this for yourselves :) )

--- [1] http://astore.amazon.com/virologyws-20/detail/1555814433 [2] http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Bruce-Alberts/d... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construct...