Interesting, though somewhat morbid, article on elite scientists and progress

I'm not entirely sure what to think of this. Partially because I'm having a little bit of trouble wrapping my head around it. Maybe part of the difficulty is that the article is from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Which, Wikipedia tells me, is a real thing.

Anywho...you can read the article I found on Vox here.

And the abstract for the original article is here (there is a $5 charge to download the complete article)