And furthermore it came as news enough to other researchers that the paper got cited many times.

But rediscovering some old math doesn't make it that bad. I've rediscovered old math before, and it was something that mathematicians around me thought was interesting because they hadn't seen it before either. What makes this particularly egregious is that everyone involved theoretically took a course that not only described this exact technique, but which described an even better one! (Simpson's rule.)

"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid." — James D. Watson

To be fair, James D. Watson is a bit of a jerk who delights in calling other people stupid. Usually winning a Nobel Prize tends to make people more charitable, since they no longer need to prove themselves to anybody... apparently it didn't work for Watson.

I wouldn't recommend following Watson's advice on the correct attitude to your fellow man.

For further information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Watson and scroll down to "Controversies".

I would speculate that the reason it didn't work for Watson is the unacknowledged use of Rosalind Franklin's data, with the resulting belief by many that Watson couldn't have done it on his own. The fact that Rosalind died in part due to radiation absorbed during collecting that data adds to the controversy.

Here is a piece of interesting trivia about that. Rosalind Franklin was a true expert on x-ray diffraction. However there are 230 possible space groups. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_group for more on that.) The x-ray diffraction pattern you see depends on the space group, and so one of the first step is to go through all of the possibilities and identify which one you have, and only then can you really start figuring out what you have. Rosalind Franklin knew about all of them. But by luck Watson's PhD thesis had been on a protein with the exact same set of symmetries that DNA has. As a result he was in a much better position than she to interpret her data.

Yes, Watson is a known jerk who got hit badly by age. That doesn't mean he's wrong when he claims most scientists are stupid. They are.