This is great. As someone who was recently diagnosed with cancer, I've found myself quite interested in furthering my knowledge on the topic.
For someone interested in the field with only a computer science background, are there any jobs in the field that could reasonably be transitioned into without any formal biology education?
Technically yes, but sadly in practice rarely enforced. Stand on a street corner in NYC for five minutes and you will see dozens of traffic violations that go unenforced. I don't agree with it, but there is a certain amount of accepted lawlessness here when it comes to driving.
I've actually really been of two minds about this since leaving AWS, though it's been a few years. On one hand, I remember spending an absurd amount of time debugging esoteric internal tooling errors that were un-googleable. The cases where you were lucky enough to find someone else who had the same issue on the internal stack-overflow or wiki were the good ones.
On the other hand, I've actually found myself missing features from amazon internal tools at the jobs I've had since. One example: I remember a pipelines feature where you could look at any change and quickly tell exactly how far that change had made it in your pipeline. At my current job, determining exactly when change X deployed to region Y has been a multi-step exercise in manually comparing commit hashes.
For someone interested in the field with only a computer science background, are there any jobs in the field that could reasonably be transitioned into without any formal biology education?