Yes, scientific progress depends on like a thousand people

A recent analysis in Nature caused a stir by pointing out that the vast majority of Nobel Prize winners belong to the same academic family. Of 736 researchers who have won the Big Recognition, 702 group together into one huge connected academic lineage (with lineage broadly defined as when one scientist “mentors” another, usually in the form of being their PhD advisor). Here's the great interconnected ball of scientific social relationships, responsible for large swaths of tip-of-the-spear progress over the past century. Most billionaires, most technology, most startups—arguably almost everything, in fact—is decades downstream of what this ball gets up to. Regarding its interconnected nature, Nature puts it as: Prizewinners often beget or emerge from the labs of other laureates. They frequently share mentors or mentees — those who supervised them or their students, or their students’ students. Who is the progenitor of this tree that became science? When I was asked the same question on

A recent analysis in Nature caused a stir by pointing out that the vast majority of Nobel Prize winners belong to the same academic family. Of 736 researchers who have won the Big Recognition, 702 group together into one huge connected academic lineage (with lineage broadly defined as when one scientist “mentors” another, usually in the form of being their PhD advisor). Here's the great interconnected ball of scientific social relationships, responsible for large swaths of tip-of-the-spear progress over the past century. Most billionaires, most technology, most startups—arguably almost everyth