EXPOSED
A large slice of the day — literature review, grant boilerplate, manuscript drafting, statistical analysis, protocol writing, sequence and image data processing — is exactly what current models do at usable quality, and AI-driven hypothesis generation is compressing the design tier too. What holds is the wet-bench and vivarium reality: running assays, handling cell lines and animal models, troubleshooting a failed experiment at the bench, and owning the call on whether a result is real. Licensure is not required for research itself (only clinical-trial PI roles lean on an MD), so the regulatory shield is thin — IRB and FDA accountability, not personal licensure.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Roughly half your week — pulling PubMed, drafting R01 aims and specific-aims boilerplate, writing methods sections, running DESeq2/flow gating pipelines, batch-analyzing imaging data — is already reproducible by current models, while pipetting a finicky co-IP, salvaging a contaminated primary culture, and reading an unexpected Western are not, which is why this sits at 10 rather than in the resistant band.
Some physical or field component. A 12 reflects that the bench is physical but climate-controlled: BSL-2 hoods, cryostorage, mouse colony handling, IACUC surgeries and perfusions, and hours at a confocal — real hands, real animals, but a fixed room with SOPs, not a field site or a patient's home.
Certification preferred, not legally required. No licence gates the work — a PhD and institutional appointment are what let you run a lab — so the 6 comes entirely from the certification layer around you: IACUC/IRB approvals, BSL and radiation-safety training, CITI, and GLP/GCP sign-offs that attach to protocols and institutions rather than to your personal credential.
Some relationship component. Manuscripts and grants are judged by anonymous peer review on the data, not on who you are, but a 7 accounts for the parts that are relational — the program officer you call before resubmission, long-running collaborator and core-facility relationships, and the trainees who chose your lab.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls. A 14 is earned by the calls nobody can procedure for you: whether an n=3 effect is real or a batch artifact, when to kill a two-year project line, which control the reviewer will demand, whether to report a finding that contradicts your own prior paper, and signing off that animal numbers and endpoints in the IACUC protocol are scientifically justified.
Anesthesiologists SAFE
Surgical Assistants SAFE
Has AI actually changed your work?