Salaries are rarely the biggest expense in lab science and it's easy for a bench scientist to spend more on reagents in a day then they will make. Then there is

Salaries are rarely the biggest expense in lab science and it's easy for a bench scientist to spend more on reagents in a day then they will make. Then there is all the very pricy equipment that is necessary, the cost of disposal of waste, the fume hoods and other extremely expensive real estate.... The overhead on a software is basically zero dollars but it's very different for science.