“Attention is all you need” has 2x as many citations as original DNA paper

Most citations are to recent scientific papers. Biologists today aren't going to say "DNA is made of A, C, T and G base pairs wound in a spiral" anymore than physicists are going to cite Newtons' Principia.

On the other hand, everybody, their brother, sister and dog are trying hundreds of neural network architectures, hoping one scores 0.01% better than the best yet, and citing that attention paper. There are just so many more people doing science today.

I remember looking at the Physical Review from the 1950s and it seems like I knew a lot of the names of the authors.