One of the reasons for them knowing it in the first place was false marketing that python "reads like English" (as if that would be a good thing).
The problems with these really smart people is that they hate not knowing everything... and lot of them a decade or two ago were never exposed to programming before they started doing research... so when they hear that it "reads like English", they feel that they can conquer it... eventually, being the smart people they are, they learn enough to get their jobs done... and some of them learn it quite well, while some others write terrible code that somehow works but they themselves don't quite understand why. But most of them would not take on another language unless someone comes up with a false claim that "it is easier than English" or some bs like that.