That last part doesn't ring true. It's like saying a championship sports team would just chug along without any particular player or coach.
Likewise research is so competitive/redundant nowadays that there are always multiple labs vying for the same results. If we lose any particular lab we will be set back at best a few months.
(For another example from history, despite the vast contributions by Newton, even if he didn't exist, we would still have discovered calculus at approximately the same time frame)