That's true, but when you start talking about reproduceable science instead of just tinkering, you need to be very careful about contamination, repeatability, e

That's true, but when you start talking about reproduceable science instead of just tinkering, you need to be very careful about contamination, repeatability, etc. This is very difficult to achieve without expensive lab equipment (although part of that expense is due to economies of scale - if everyone started buying centrifuges and gram scales, maybe they wouldn't cost thousands of dollars).