But I'm sure glad I don't have to go near any of this stuff!
Hard to believe there's any hobby chemists out there messing with mercury and stuff, handling most of these chemicals seems like something you'd only ever do for a huge salary or if you believed your work was going to save many lives.
It doesn't seem to be 100% computerized yet, people still talk about doing real experiments where they expect to find something new about what they're studying, as opposed to just finding their own mistakes or reading about other people's discoveries.
I'd imagine that's probably part of the appeal for some people, in tech so many of us almost never discover anything new that would be of interest outside that one specific project, except an occasional framework bug.