EXPOSED
This catch-all category spans bench researchers, field biologists, and agency/industry science staff; the modal worker splits time between hands-on protocols (culturing, sampling, assays, specimen handling) and screen work (literature synthesis, statistical analysis, manuscript and grant drafting, protocol writing) — and the screen half is exactly what LLMs now do at usable quality. Wet-lab and field execution stays human because lab automation is capital-intensive and biological samples are messy, but no license protects the role and nobody hires a biologist for the relationship. Experimental design and interpretation under genuine uncertainty are the durable core; routine analysis and writing are not.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. At 11 the split is roughly even: pipetting a qPCR plate, dissecting a specimen, or running a transect through wetland cover has no software substitute, but the literature review, sequence alignment pipelines, R/Python analysis scripts, methods sections and grant boilerplate that fill the other half of the week are now first-draft work for a model, which is why this sits below the 14 line rather than at it.
Some physical or field component. A 12 reflects that the bench work is real but mostly indoors and controlled — BSL-2 hoods, incubators, cryostorage, microscopy — with field sampling, animal handling, or greenhouse and mesocosm work adding uncontrolled conditions for a substantial minority of the category rather than all of it.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no biologist's license: you can run a lab bench with a BS and no board exam, and where oversight exists it flows through the institution — IRB, IACUC, IBC, or a licensed veterinarian or PI who signs the protocol — so nobody can be barred from practice, only from a grant.
Some relationship component. A 6 covers the relationships that do matter — a PI who knows your hands, a collaborating agency biologist, a contract sponsor who trusts your assay results — but the output is a dataset or a peer-reviewed paper that is judged on reproducibility by strangers, not on who produced it.
Meaningful discretion. At 12 you own the calls that shape the science — which controls a design actually needs, whether a contaminated run gets discarded or reported, how to interpret an ambiguous population trend or an off-target effect — but those calls are checked by PIs, reviewers, and replication before anyone's health or money is on the line, which is what separates this from the 14+ band.
Physicians, Pathologists EXPOSED
Veterinarians SAFE
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