Excuse my English. Wrote wrong and let firefox correct it without giving much attention to the suggestion. Sorry.
From The Robots of Dawn:
"If you died, then, the new science dies with you?"
"I am only a hundred and sixty-five years old. That's metric years, of course, so it is only a hundred and twenty-four of your Earth years, more or less. I am still quite young by Auroran standards and there is no medical reason why my life should be considered even half over. It is not entirely unusual to reach an age of four hundred years--metric years. There is yet plenty of time to teach."
...
"Some of our scientists had accomplished quite a deal in considerably less time."
"Because they have taken advantage of the findings others have made before them and profit from the use they can make of contemporary findings by others. Isn't that so?"
...
"Is not this the case on Aurora and the other Spacer worlds, too?" asked Baley.
"In theory it is; in practice not so much. The pressures in a long-lived society are less. Scientists here have three or three and a half centuries to devote to a problem, so that the thought arises that significant progress may be made in that time by a solitary worker, It becomes possible to feel a kind of intellectual greed--to want to accomplish something on your own, to assume a property right to a particular facet of progress, to be wiling to see the general advance slowed--rather than give up what you conceive to be yours alone. And the general advance is slowed on Spacer worlds as a result, to the point where it is difficult to outpace the work done on Earth, despite our enormous advantages."
I'd be interested in a reference for that, as I don't off-hand recall it.