People doing PCR for 6 years are probably generating a pretty big dataset for analysis...

Bioinformatics is an entire field. The lines between molecular biology, genetics, physics, chemistry, statistics, and computer science are getting very blurry these days. Plenty of bio phds get hired for data scientist roles in industry.

No one is going to knock you for leaving for industry these days. Anyone who is a big deal enough in academia to have that kind of ego is already going to have started a company or three themselves on the side.

PCR doesn't necessarily generate large data sets.

And as someone who works in the field, there's definitely a stigma against students not aiming for PI positions at R1 institutions. There's some practical reasons for that - students who go into industry are less useful for "empire building", but it's also cultural.

I'm lucky enough to be in a field where this isn't as true, but I'm faculty in a multidisciplinary center, and the closer you get to pure biology, the worse it gets.

There might be a stigma in certain places that are becoming isolated from the field, but I would be flabbergasted to hear of any stigma in biology existing on the west or east costs where biotech is, where professors are regularly collaborating directly with biotech companies, where professors are regularly founding their own biotech startups, where graduate programs are offering internship opportunites with private companies, where graduate programs are regularly hosting symposiums with industry representatives, and where departments regularly see the majority of their graduating classes go into industry rather than academia. I think this worldview is two decades out of date.