I will give two reasons. First, the amount of knowledge available in any field is so large that it is beyond the capacity of any single scientist to know or understand it all. Second, most lab chiefs spend so much time trying to obtain funding that they are more appropriately viewed as professional grant writers than as "scholars of the scientific domain."
Science is an excellent tool, an analytical method for obtaining information about our environment, and scientists are those individuals who employ this method, with varying degrees of skill, in the pursuit of knowledge.
The big labs that get the big results and publish in the big-20 journals are driven by the young ideas and cheap labor of their graduate students and postdocs. This indenture has always been justified by the sheer pleasure of doing research and the knowledge that a chance to captain your own lab was in ...
