This reminds me of a question I've long wondered about. If you only knew about the US university system from reading Nature and Science and Cell, you'd think there were only 20 universities in the country. (I once was talking with a German postdoc at MIT who did think that!) But the difference between winding up in a position at, say, UCSD versus KU has such a large element of luck, you'd think that the difference between the faculty at the 15-20th top schools and the 80-90th top schools can't be that much. So why do you almost never see the latter in top journals, at least in the molecular biology literature I read?

My best guess is that the quality of grad student (and, to a lesser extent, postdocs) is the key limiting factor, which suggests that you can't bring in a bunch of profs and expect them to change everything.

Interestingly, Singapore has done a remarkable job of developing a world-class genomics community from basically zero, in less than a decade. But doing that in a small country is different than doing it in one corner of a huge country.