Thinking of my experiences on commercial development teams in the USA, I think you should be prepared 1) to deal with a lot of prejudice and 2) to find infrequent interactions that are compassionate and gratifying.

John C. Lilly invented an isolation tank. He would drop acid and spend hours in there. A weird genius got weirder. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly

I worked as a contractor developing a system at FDA. It lasted for 5 years. Inside the Beltway, it's pretty much the same all over. Dysfunctional communications and ridiculous breakdown of authority not corresponding to lines of management. No accountability. Project management requirements that have never been followed by any project. No commitment to the output of requirements gathering. No requirements change control. No performance engineering. Inadequate testing. No acceptance process by the government. IT groups with oversight for contractor output that have never written a line of code. All in all, pretty sick and ugly. Prior to my project there were 5 failed attempts. My project followed PMI practices, worked them hard and succeeded.

Bell Labs used to like to hire teachers and re-train them for programmer and system test jobs. Re-treads was what some HR recruiters called them.

Completing time sheets when you're spending less than your baseline 40 hours working can bring a person otherwise behaving ethically to begin employing creative justifications to explain how sitting in your underwear in a spare bedroom reading slashdot is billable to the project's marketing budget

Every month this sort of article comes out. Maybe they are getting close. Somebody is going to get the cure or the vaccine but today the best treatment for humans is levadopa and that drug is from the 1950s. There are lots of things that can treat PD in a mouse or a monkey but for people, not so much. Although injection of Ganglioside GM-1 had a successful clinical trial.

Tell your interviewer if you provide leadership in technology directions: evaluating, and accepting or rejecting novel artifacts into products is an example. Setting coding standards, adopting new technology releases or taking initiative to organize work for the whole team are other examples. Show by examples how you are a person whose contributions reached others in your business and market segment.

Consider climate research. In the US that might be NCAR or GFDL. Lots of FORTRAN but newer languages common, too. Use applied physics. World Class supercomputers. Parallel algorithms. Lower pay scale. Some, not all, scientists pigeon hole programmers and look down on them.