My solid state physics professor in undergrad was an experimental ferromagnetic metallurgist on a shoestring budget. If you're not familiar with this field, this means she regularly handled magnets that could and had broken her bones when they slipped, and also home-built open-air radio furnaces that would have a dropped quarter halfway to slag before it hit the bottom. She once built a lock-in amplifier from a hubcab she found in the parking lot, a toy car motor, a flashlight, and a light sensor, and it didn't just work, it worked well. Her lab contained precautions against things like "the potential of an ever-expanding pool of death" and "actual fucking lava".
"Metal" would be an apt term for her, if only it wasn't too mild to describe her. This woman was casting lead ballast under her father's supervision to go sailing on a stormy lake when she was 8. She was one of the first women to be allowed in her grad school engineering program. She and her friend organized a 10 year long hostile takeover of our physics department's hiring committee and then spent the next 20 years systemically hiring decent and diverse people while driving out the bigoted assholes, driven by sheer bare-knuckled spite and an absolutely unbreakable will.
And I will never forget the horror with which she once described the insanity that is chemists. Back when she'd worked in industry, she'd had a crucible with a metal residue on the inside which she just could not scrub out. So she went to one of the company's chemists for help, figuring he'd know what to do.
And the fucking madman, in defiance of all sense and reason, pulled out a fucking squirt bottle of hydrofluoric acid from his desk drawer, spritzed it in the crucible, wiped it out with a rag and a stir rod, and gave it back to her. He then offered her the squirt bottle to take.
My professor - one of the most inspiringly hardcore people I've ever met - had a haunted expression on her face as she told us she had declined. But that the madman had simply smiled, shrugged, put the bottle away, and told her that it was no trouble, if she ever needed a crucible cleaned again just come on back.
Chemists, she explained to us, scare her.
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