Is it possible to conduct scientific research without actually getting close to the sample/specimen?
It depends on one's field - whether what you study actually requires first-hand knowledge of the experimental subject and the methods of dealing with or not. Moreover, one could invert the question and ask, whether a field, based solely on the knowledge of the experimental subject, can be considered science?
Theoretical physics/chemistry/etc.
In some sciences, such as physics, there is traditional division into experimentalists and theoreticians - the former are people who actually work in a lab, but who limit themselves to very basic statistical analysis of the phenomena observed. The latter are providing deeper, model-based, analysis of the data and description of the phenomena. Very often their work is not tied to any particular experiment, bordering on very abstract math. Looking at the list of the Nobel prize winners in physics one can easily convince oneself that this work is no less valuable than the experimental work.
Similar division exists in other fields, e.g., one can freely talk about quantum/theoretical/computational chemistry.
Computational biology, bioinformatics, biostatistics, epidemiology, population genetics
Although biology is relatively young science, the times when it was frowned upon by physicists as mere stamp collecting have long been gone: evolutionary theory and epidemiology have been put on a firm mathematical footing, and the explosion of genomic data in the last couple of decades has ushered in the professions of bioinformatician and computational biologist - all complete with designated job descriptions and advanced university programs. Less noticeable, but no else widespread is the observation using modern technology - such as video and sound recording - every conference features a few talks like this, related to swarms of insects, flocks of birds, or behavior of whales (incidentally, whales have been extensively studied in connection to tracing enemy submarines. The analysis of the data is often done very far away from the sea.)

All science is either physics or stamp collecting. - a quote attributed to Ernest Rutherford, but likely of even earlier origin.