{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/medical-scientists-except-epidemiologists/",
  "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": "Medical Scientists, Except Epidemiologists",
    "soc_code": "19-1042",
    "category": "Science",
    "us_employment": 172340,
    "median_annual_wage": 103410
  },
  "verdict": "EXPOSED",
  "risk_resistance": 49,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 10,
    "embodiment": 12,
    "liability_shield": 6,
    "trust_premium": 7,
    "judgment_accountability": 14
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "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.",
    "embodiment": "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.",
    "liability_shield": "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.",
    "trust_premium": "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.",
    "judgment_accountability": "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."
  },
  "rationale": "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.",
  "outlook": "Headcount holds but shifts: fewer positions doing analysis-and-writing work, more concentrated in bench execution, platform operation, and translational decision-making, with output per scientist rising sharply.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "FDA/OHRP or journal-side rules that require a named human investigator to attest personally to data provenance and AI involvement — e.g. an expansion of FDA 21 CFR Part 11 / ALCOA+ data-integrity attestation to cover AI-generated analyses, or an ICMJE/NIH rule making a specific author personally accountable for every AI-produced figure and statistic. Data Integrity Warning Letters already name individuals; formalizing a signature block for AI-assisted analysis would attach personal exposure.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "State clinical-laboratory rules (CLIA high-complexity testing, NY State CLEP) already require a doctoral-level qualified person to sign out validated assays; extension of that signatory model to research-grade AI/ML-derived biomarker and sequencing pipelines used in translational work would pull a slice of 19-1042 under a named-signer regime.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Task-mix shift is genuine here: the occupation has a routine tier (lit review, boilerplate, standard stats, image segmentation) and a judgment tier (assay design under confounds, deciding a surprising result is real vs artifact, troubleshooting a failed prep). If the routine tier is fully automated and headcount contracts to the bench-plus-adjudication tier, measured resistance of the remaining role rises. Watch for reproducibility crises traced to unvalidated AI analyses, which push funders to require human wet-lab confirmation of computational findings.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "embodiment",
        "change": "Rises only in relative terms — if automated liquid handlers and cloud labs stay confined to standardized protocols while novel-model, primary-tissue, and vivarium work resists standardization, the surviving job is disproportionately hands-on. AAALAC and IACUC requirements for trained human handling and daily animal-welfare judgment keep vivarium work human-attached.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "If institutions respond to AI-generated research misconduct by naming a single accountable scientist per study (analogous to a study-record custodian), and if research-integrity offices begin sanctioning individuals for unverified AI outputs, the role's ownership of consequential calls under ambiguity becomes formally recognized rather than diffuse.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "Trust premium has no plausible route: grant reviewers and pharma buyers pay for validated results, not for human authorship, and no purchaser segment specifically demands a human-generated hypothesis. Liability gains are capped because research licensure does not exist and no professional body is credibly moving toward it; the shield can only grow through data-integrity attestation and CLIA-adjacent signoff, not personal licensure."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 111690,
        "wage": 82090
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 120320,
        "wage": 84810
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 127180,
        "wage": 88790
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 126110,
        "wage": 91510
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 108550,
        "wage": 95310
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 110550,
        "wage": 99930
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 136620,
        "wage": 100890
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 156300,
        "wage": 100590
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 172340,
        "wage": 103410
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": 54.3,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}