It's still very political - with a small p.

For example the recent nobel prize for Chemistry being awarded to David Baker, Dennis Hassabis and John Jumper.

Why the hell is David Baker on that list? He was just the head of a very big lab that was working in the traditional way using largely physics based approaches, making incremental progress.

AlphaFold blew that whole approach out of the water.

They cite the design of Top7 back in 2003 - it's not at the level of impact as Alphafold.

The impact of Alphafold is obvious to all - the importance of the 2003 Baker paper doesn't stand out to me from 1000's of other possible candidates - that's where self-promotion, visibility and politics plays a part.

The 2003 Baker paper has 2249 citations over 22 years. The 2021 AlphaFold paper has had 43876 citations in 4 years..........