{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/life-scientists-all-other/", "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology", "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.", "scored_at": "2026-08-11", "model": "claude-opus-5", "occupation": { "title": "Life Scientists, All Other", "soc_code": "19-1099", "category": "Science", "us_employment": 7460, "median_annual_wage": 93750 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 43, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 10, "embodiment": 11, "liability_shield": 4, "trust_premium": 6, "judgment_accountability": 12 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "Sequence QC, differential-expression pipelines, literature triage for a review, and first-draft methods sections are already handed to tooling in most labs in this bucket, but designing an assay that discriminates between two competing mechanisms, troubleshooting why the western blot failed on the third replicate, and running a field transect still take a person — a roughly even split, which is why this sits at 10 rather than in the resistant band.", "embodiment": "Bench work here is pipetting, culture maintenance, dissection, and instrument runs in a controlled BSL-1/2 lab, with periodic field sampling — soil cores, water grabs, trapping — that is genuinely uncontrolled but seasonal rather than daily, so it lands above pure desk science and below the year-round outdoor roles that score 15+.", "liability_shield": "No state licence gates the title: you can run this work with a PhD or a master's and nobody countersigns your results, and the constraints that do exist — IRB and IACUC approval, select-agent registration, IBC review — attach to the institution and the protocol, not to your name, so the 4 reflects committee oversight rather than personal legal exposure.", "trust_premium": "Your outputs are peer-reviewed papers, agency reports, and internal data packages that are judged on the numbers rather than on who produced them, though sustained relationships with a program officer, a collaborating field agency, or a long-running study site do carry weight that a stranger cannot instantly replicate — enough for 6, not the named-advisor dependence of clinical or consulting roles.", "judgment_accountability": "You decide when a surprising result is an artefact versus a finding, whether the effect size justifies another year of sampling, and how to word an uncertainty caveat that a regulator or a biosecurity customer will act on — real discretion with real consequences, but almost always filtered through PIs, co-authors, and reviewers before it binds anyone, which caps it at 12." }, "rationale": "This is a catch-all bucket — biosecurity analysts, ecological researchers, lab-based bioinformatics and regulatory science staff — and the modal worker splits time between bench or field protocols and screen work: literature synthesis, dataset cleaning, statistical runs, manuscript and grant drafting. The screen half is exactly what LLMs and AutoML now do at usable quality, which compresses the analyst tier hard. What persists is hands-on assay execution, field sampling in messy conditions, and deciding which experiment is actually worth running and whether a result is real.", "outlook": "By 2035 the pure data-analysis and writing portion of these roles is largely AI-assisted, and headcount concentrates in people who run physical experiments, collect field data, and are accountable for what the results mean.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Task-mix shift: once literature synthesis, data cleaning and first-draft manuscript work are routinely AI-generated, the remaining defensible core is experimental design, assay troubleshooting and adjudicating whether an anomalous result is real. This bucket genuinely has two tiers, and the residual tier is design-and-verify. Watch for journal/funder policies (Nature, NIH) that require named human attestation of data provenance and analysis choices, which pins verification work to a person.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "embodiment", "change": "Growth in field-heavy subspecialties — eDNA sampling, invasive-species and wildlife-disease surveillance under USDA APHIS/USGS contracts, and BSL-3 containment work where remote or robotic handling is not permitted by the institutional biosafety committee — shifts the modal day toward unstructured outdoor and glovebox work.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Biosecurity screening is the live route: if the Executive-Order-derived nucleic-acid synthesis screening framework (OSTP/ASPR guidance, and the International Gene Synthesis Consortium protocols) hardens into a rule requiring a named, qualified human reviewer to sign off on flagged sequence-order hits and personally attest, that creates a statutory human signature where none exists today. Parallel route: EPA/FIFRA and FDA GLP study-director attestation being extended to require the study director to personally certify AI-assisted analyses.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 5 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Formal designation of role-holders as accountable persons in regulated regimes — GLP Study Director under 40 CFR 160/792, Responsible Official under the CDC/APHIS Select Agent Program, or biosafety officer sign-off on dual-use research of concern reviews. These are named-individual consequential calls under ambiguity and already exist; expansion of who must hold them raises the score.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 } ], "ceiling_note": "Trust premium has no realistic route: the buyers are grant panels, agencies and contract sponsors who purchase results and compliance, not human authorship, and no client segment pays extra for a human ecologist or bioinformatician as such. Also note the shield levers apply unevenly — a select-agent Responsible Official gains a lot, a soft-money ecology postdoc in the same SOC bucket gains nothing, so the bucket average moves far less than any individual subspecialty." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 7120, "wage": 74540 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 6850, "wage": 78190 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 6450, "wage": 75910 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 6540, "wage": 82000 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 6820, "wage": 81500 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 8320, "wage": 83930 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 7490, "wage": 86950 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 7320, "wage": 87800 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 7460, "wage": 93750 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": 4.8, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }