Indeed, although some of this is the luck of timing. E.g. Richard Feynman would likely have been one of the great names in quantum mechanics ... if it weren't for the fact he was 8 years old right then. Linus Pauling, born 17 years earlier, became the 20th century's most preeminent chemist in part because he was a fricking genius and writer (many of his books are still useful today), but key was that also in 1926 he got a Guggenheim Fellowship to study under some European physicists like Bohr and Schrödinger for a couple of years, and was therefore one of the first to apply quantum mechanics to chemistry, a very fruitful approach.