The key takeaways are that there are lots of people involved with making these breakthroughs.
The value of grad students is often overlooked, they contribute so much and then later on advance the research even more.
Why does America look on research as a waste, when it has move everything so far?
Why do you say that America looks in research as a waste? We spend higher percentage of gdp on R&D than just about any other country in the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_re...
It's more accurate to say that businesspeople consider research a waste in our quarter-by-quarter investment climate, since it generally doesn't lead to immediate gains.
And our current leadership considers research a threat, since science rarely supports conspiracy theorists or historical revisionism.
More charitably, America's current government has an unusually large concentration of business people. Interestingly, they were elected as a vote for change by a population of non business people who were tired of the economic marginalization they suffered when their government consisted largely of non business people not once but twice. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.