Other than a microscope and accessories, it doesn’t take much special equipment to learn about biology. You’ll need some general lab equipment, chemicals, and so on, but much of what you need can be improvised or substituted for by items inexpensively available from the drugstore or hardware store. If you keep a close eye on your budget, you can complete most or all of the lab sessions in this book for surprisingly little money.

You’ll have decisions to make that balance cost versus time versus quality. For example, many lab sessions call for prepared microscope slides. If low cost is your top priority, you can prepare many of those slides yourself for a few cents each in materials, but at the expense of significant time and effort and possibly lower quality. Conversely, if you want top quality and cost is a low priority relative to your time, you can purchase very high quality prepared slides, although those may cost $5 to $20 or more apiece. Or you can compromise by purchasing inexpensive prepared slides for a buck or two apiece. Their quality won’t be as good as that of the expensive prepared slides, but they’ll probably be good enough for your purposes, and bu....