Fame
With the minor exception of our main man Mendel, there are pretty much zero geneticists who can honestly claim to have a household name. It's not their fault—we're sure they're a swell bunch of dudes and dudettes—but this is often how it goes in science.
Unlike a whole bunch of other fields, though, the field of genetics is seriously in vogue. Remember when a bunch of scientists got three billion dollars from Congress to sequence the entirety of the human genome and then finished two years early (source)? How about when the Supreme Court had to officially rule on whether or not it was legal for corporations to patent genes (source)?
So while you might not get bothered for an autograph anytime soon, you might just find yourself a crucial part of an equally important (or just plain cool) project in the near future, regardless.