[ihnorton]

As Q4273j3b pointed out, improving quantitative skills is a must. The upcoming Coursera Machine Learning course would probably be a good start (a lot of the necessary math is introduced in the course).

Regarding the degree, credentials are important (and imperative if you want to direct your own research), but one option is to start out by contributing to an open-source project. If you have a specific area of scientific interest, then be strategic and find a project in that area. To take biology as an example, I would look at something like CellProfiler (they are on github!). Also read the papers published by that lab to get a sense for how the software is used. There are many other open-source scientific software projects, and contributions to a project could give you a foot in the door to employment as a developer in the field.