In science, it might just be 1% of the top 1% who make the big breakthroughs - how many times did one guy make more than one really huge breakthrough? I can think of one big fuzzy-haired counterexample.
So if by some accident we missed a genius, she would probably be replaced by a bunch of merely clever people.
We depend on weird people.
Also, the crowd sourcing aspect of the whole protein folding thing merely involved doing the grunt work, of which there was so much the scientists that set up the parameters for it couldn't possibly do it all themselves. The true achievement was thinking up the parameters for the thousands of monkeys to twiddle, not the twiddling itself.
So let me correct it - it's not the exception that proves the rule, it's yet another example of crowd sourcing contributing little of true significance.
That is why it doesn't matter if 99.999% of the world is pre-occupied with one mindvirus or other. It's the 1-in-100k person who really takes humanity to the next level of greatness/depravity.
There will always be ambitious people for whom this world will be too small: they will colonize the next planet.