Having worked at a large world renowned genetics laboratory as an SWE I believe I can say that it is unlikely you will have the option of having any direct input into this kind of work, in that role.
That being said, there is a lot of things an SWE can do in a support role.
Some of the things I did were data processing pipelines (both automatic and human centric UI for phenotype gathering) and interconnected networks of scientific instruments, as well as some deployments of R and Python code.
Sure, your name wont show up along with hundreds of others in the Nature publications, but you will know that you contributed to the overall success. And it does feel good.
