Jobs / Science and research / 19-1099.00

Life Scientists, All Other

All life scientists not listed separately.

US jobs: 7,460
Median wage: $93,750 a year
Job family: Science and research

Can agents do the work of life scientists, all other?

We read the evidence at the level of the job family, Science and research:

Task levelPartialThin evidence. CORE-Bench asks agents to reproduce the results of published papers in computer science, social science, and medicine from the authors' code and data. Princeton's HAL team declared it solved in December 2025: Claude Code with Claude Opus 4.5 scored 95.5% after manual regrading. No benchmark in our collection tests new experiments or lab work.
Project levelNot yetThin evidence. On PaperBench, where agents replicate machine learning papers from scratch, the best official result is 26.0% (o1, April 2025). On a small subset, ML PhDs scored 41.4% against o1's 26.6%. No newer official results exist, and no benchmark tests research projects in other sciences.

Benchmarks for the job family

These cover work in science and research, not always this occupation's tasks.

CORE-Benchby Princeton UniversityTask level · CORE-Bench-Hard accuracy (public test set)
95.5%Claude Code + Claude Opus 4.5 (after manual regrading) · 3 Dec 2025
Solved
PaperBenchby OpenAIProject level · Average replication score
26%IterativeAgent o1-high (36h limit) · 2 Apr 2025
Emerging

Other job titles for this occupation (12)

Collector of Aquarium Specimens · Embryologist · Forensic Scientist · Life Science Taxonomist · Morphologist · Olericulturist · Osteologist · Paleobotanist · Physiologist · Phytopathologist · Plant Taxonomist · Public Health Microbiologist