In Jaws, Richard Dreyfuss played a scientist who worked in the field and that field was shark infested waters. A few others who eschewed the lab and met science face-to-face.
Charles Martin Smith in Starman. D: John Carpenter (1984). In this story about an alien anthropologist hunted by the government, Smith as a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scientist is the only earthling who has met the enemy and knows it is us.
Jeffrey Combs in Re-Animator. D: Stuart Gordon (1985). Combs played a medical student with a rejuvenation solution who doesn’t see the point of lab experiments when there’s a whole world full of potential corpses and……hey, look! It’s a disembodied head!
Laura Dern in Jurassic Park. D: Stephen Spielberg (1993). Dern is a paleobotanist investigating a park that features real-life dinosaurs. When a colleague describes the process as “God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs,” she finishes with “Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth.”
Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton in Twister. D: Jan de Bont (1996). An estranged pair of meteorologists/storm chasers are about to finalize their divorce so that he can marry his fiancée, when a major storm system hits the Midwest and well, old habits die hard. Pretty much a gender inversion of His Girl Friday, not as funny but with better special effects.
Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day. D: Roland Emmerich (1996). Goldblum, an MIT-trained satellite technician, figures out what the alien ships who are hovering over most of Earth’s cities are up to, and later comes up with a plan to keep the ETs from destroying the rest of the planet and Goldblum finally gets to play the lead in a blockbuster.
