having been a biochemist (and maybe going back) but also a professional programmer, I am very pessimistic about this.

One time, though, I used ruby to scrape a chinese website where they made 'public' the genome of an organism. They clearly weren't interested in actually making it public (as the sequences were very hard to pull), and after we had gotten the data they made it impossible and took down announcements that it was public, so sometimes real computer skills are welcome!