The culture, lab organization, and incentives unfortunately are making this more common I think. The head of a lab these days acts much more like a manager/boss, and less like a researcher among colleagues, than they might have a few decades ago. The role of grad students has become more employee-like as well, and professors aren't always too scrupulous about how much credit they give them.
Not that there haven't always been egocentric scientists, but their counterpart, the humble scientist who's almost too humble in emphasizing the role of colleagues, students, luck, collaborators, etc., is an almost extinct species.
It's interesting to compare the abstracts of a typical modern science paper versus one from 100 years ago or so. The old ones often have this almost exaggerated humility, along the lines of: Dear Sirs, I beg your time to present some results of my investigations which, though admittedly focusing on only on the special case X, will, I hope, add in some small way to the excellent recent treatment given the subject by Professor So-and-so. Today that abstract would probably be written the other way around, emphasizing the enormous importance of special case X, pointing out that while Professor So-and-so did study this broad area, his results are seriously deficient in some respect, and then closing with a sentence or two about how ground-breaking this new treatment of the problem is.
The old ones often have this almost exaggerated humility
Yes, but there were a lot fewer of them. Back when you
could fit, e.g., the world physics community in a single auditorium, things were different.
And modern bio research is insane. It's insanely expensive, and it's insanely competitive. Even the most talented postdocs need luck and politics to escape permanent postdochood. So I don't blame the woman for coming out swinging. She's probably bright enough to realize that she's crazy lucky to have found something this interesting, even if the interestingness is exaggerated, and she should pitch this for all it's worth.
Yeah, I think that's the proximate cause: lots more competition and more insecure academic positions leads to more ruthless interactions with colleagues, a term that itself might be getting a bit obsolete with the decline of collegiality.
If I had to pick one part of it that bugged me most, it'd be the constant need to attack and dismiss other people's research. Very few scientists these days refer to something like the "excellent recent treatment of the subject by Professor So-and-so", unless it's a treatment of a subject that doesn't compete with the author's own research. Instead, usual practice is to paint competing research in the worst possible light, and only grudgingly admit any related work that was actually on-point and good.
There was PhD Comics strip somewhere that jokingly listed phrases least likely to appear in a scientific paper, one of which was, "Previous work by X et al (2009) was actually pretty good!". Of course, it's not entirely because authors have suddenly become huge jerks; the incentives on them push in that direction. With many more submissions, reviewers have gotten much harsher about demanding that authors distinguish themselves from existing work and prove that theirs is novel and superior, which supplies an incentive for authors to trash existing work.
Not that there haven't always been egocentric scientists, but their counterpart, the humble scientist who's almost too humble in emphasizing the role of colleagues, students, luck, collaborators, etc., is an almost extinct species.
It's interesting to compare the abstracts of a typical modern science paper versus one from 100 years ago or so. The old ones often have this almost exaggerated humility, along the lines of: Dear Sirs, I beg your time to present some results of my investigations which, though admittedly focusing on only on the special case X, will, I hope, add in some small way to the excellent recent treatment given the subject by Professor So-and-so. Today that abstract would probably be written the other way around, emphasizing the enormous importance of special case X, pointing out that while Professor So-and-so did study this broad area, his results are seriously deficient in some respect, and then closing with a sentence or two about how ground-breaking this new treatment of the problem is.