So my cousin R is married to Dr. James Thompson, who got the first published stem cell research. R did a bunch of work with him, she's also a biologist.

She told me, maybe 10 years back, (maybe more) that the reason they got the paper and none of the other teams doing it did is that they just. Kept going. Didn't give up on it, even when it looked hard.

Anyway. What I mean is: probably 75% of skill is having talent and then being really stubborn about making it work.