Glassblowers who make high end pieces for people to smoke marijuana out of work pretty exclusively in quartz and borosilicate, and will certainly have experience with lathes. See for instance http://waterworksglass.com/?cat=13 https://mothershipglass.com/collections/

That said, they would clearly have to do a lot of learning and training for the more specific scientific applications, and since many artists get thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars per piece, I'm sure you'd have a hard time luring them away. On top of that, they probably couldn't be stoned all day and would go from making art to making whatever functional objects are needed.