People who don't read SF often have the idea that the genre is full of scientific theories that are hard to understand. In reality that often isn't the case.
Hard SF built around the invention of some new tech is the sort of story outsiders to the genre think of, but a great deal of SF is soft, focusing on cultures, alternate histories, and social structures of societies.
In our own lives most of us don't know how our car's engine management system or our computers work, we just use the tech. This will be so in the future too. And that gets us off the hook as writers. We need only describe what future tech does without knowing how to design it in detail.
For Panthera : Death Spiral, I needed to know about DNA and epigenetics, and about the workings of the thymus gland. I learned enough to know how many genes a human body has, and how genes are controlled by the epigenome, but I won't be doing any gene splicing any day soon.
The trick is to know enough to be able to work out a plausible plot for your story. In Panthera : Death Spiral the plot revolves around discovering who is stealing kingcat thymus cells, and why they need them. And that took me into examining DNA. But I couldn't give you a detailed breakdown of what gene does what. I don't need that level of detail.
Popular science books usually give me enough knowledge of the topic, so do TV programmes. In England we have excellent wildlife filmmaking, courtesy of the BBC. And programmes like Horizon tackle serious science topics in an accessible way, providing a valuable overview of complex cosmology or biological theories, or the state of AI research.
Even popular science summaries can be enough to throw up story ideas, or confirm that the one I'm writing has plausible science or tech in it. And that's all I need as a soft SF writer.
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