[ejstronge]

With the utmost respect to you and the post you responded to, research is about answering questions to things you find interesting; for a biologist, pipetting is simply the means you take to get there.

If you want to contribute to Firefox or any other non-trivial open source project, you need to spend time creating a development environment and it likely will take weeks to months before you can make a substantive contribution.

If anyone is reading the comment I'm responding to or its parent comment, keep in mind that the manual labor is in pursuit of a goal.

[innguest]

I think your parent is alluding to the fact things could be automated in biological research but aren't because of the disincentives; and that at the same time things in tech are more amenable to automation and often parts of it are indeed automated.

Yes, it's all a means to an end, but how much time one wants to spend in the "means" (which can get extremely repetitive, apparently) is what counts for the parent (I'm supposing).