[khitan]

You can't run an (experimental) research program without a lot of money and even then most academic labs are run off a shoestring budget (reagents, lab space, instrumentation + maintenance/electricity for such, access to university and regional instrumentation e.g. synchrotrons, high field NMR, supercomputers, paying your full-time research staff i.e. mostly grad students and post-docs a working class wage)- even at elite institutions there's a heavy reliance on used and archaic equipment (hand-me-downs from the 80s and 90s). 'Grant grabbing' is strictly necessary for having the money to run a research program beyond something utterly barely bones (and likely fatally limited in scope in many fields as a result) on both instrumental/facilities access and output- and you can't get tenure and thus remain employed as an independent researcher without grants anywhere big anyway (grants are proof of promise/success and are necessary for engaging in ambitious projects- and the demand for academic tenure track positions is quite saturated so if you can't manage they can probably find someone else who can). Most faculty I know work (primarily writing grants and publication and to varying extents chewing through data and models with students) on weekends (and expect their personnel to do the same), especially ones still vying for tenure track (who often still work in the lab directly as well). The pay and hours are pretty poor relative to industry (abysmal if you consider time spent as a post-doc) and the stress is quite high- it's not something done in this day and age for the sake of wanting an easy road through life.

Essentially everyone planning to go into the basic sciences as their primary specialty needs to go and work in a laboratory anyway to some extent to get into grad school (my entire cohort did one to three years of lab work in undergraduate); and those who don't in my discipline are typically pre-meds (but who are still rewarded in apps for doing research so plenty of 'em did so) who have to do a lot of hospital volunteering and whatnot for their admissions process. However, undergraduates have less time to work, less experience/knowledge due to being partially through coursework, and are often less motivated because research isn't do-or-die for them like grad students and post-docs- taking them on can have opportunity costs for laboratories even though their labor is typically cheap or free.