Also, what kind of scientist was this? I'm a physicist. I'm deeply concerned about the reproducibility of my results. I periodically try to rebuild my software systems on a clean computer to make sure it's both possible and well documented.
My wife's attitude is typical: If they want to touch my computer, they can buy one that they own.
In this case the scientist was a postdoc so they partly used the group lead's funding and partly had their own funding. That money was for science, not buying computers. It paid for NMR machine (a $10M device), solvents, reagents, going to conferences, grad students, color figures in papers... but my professor was fairly well-funded so we had a full-time "professional" sysadmin (not a grad student) and everybody had a $15K SGI Indy on their desk (which was abysmally slow, because it was the lowest of the low end capable of running OpenGL).
By way of comparison, biology and related 'sciences' ( psychology, medicine, nutrition, microbiology etc.) will appear to be nearly a scam...