This ties back into AI, too, right?

I always like to bring up how many decades of research, how many hundreds of years of entire PhD-theses, how many sleepless nights were used up to generate all the protein structure data that made up the corpus of Protein Data Bank - that was then hovered up by the AlphaFold team, and guess who got the Nobel Prize...

Just like all non-AI related nobel prizes before them.

Every laureate stands on the shoulder of giants which is their field as a generations-spanning body of researchers. They did the last step and get recognized. The good ones acknowledge that in their acceptance speeches.