You make a very good point, but you need to take it a step further. Science, as a whole, does work around the politics and personal egos of the scientists in question. A simple example is to look at the scientific peer reviewed journals. There are a lot of heated, but politely written, exchanges. Over time adn across disciplines, such attitudes are diluted. One generation of scientists leads to another that have different opinions. If Rutherford were still around, nuclear power may not have been acheived because he was a prominent, politically connected scietist who firmly believed that the nucleus of an atom was fixed - it could never be split. Younger scientists took up the challenge and proved otherwise and we have nuclear energy and weapons as a result.
Rutherford may have had some hidebound ideas, but he demonstrated the splitting of the atom circa 1911. He exposed a pure assay of IIRC nitrogen to a bombardment of alpha particles from the decay of uranium. After some period of time, the same gas was full of various lighter elements because of the nucleus-shattering collisions.