So I did a mini research project on Claude to answer your question. From 1900-1930, 87% of Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry and Physiology/Medicine were awarded to individual contributions, 13% were awarded to collaborative contributions.
This ratio has flipped in the past 30 years, from 1994-2023, where 17% prizes were individual, 83% collaborative.
So I'd say yes, collaborative work is increasingly a requirement to do groundbreaking research today. The organizational structures and funding are a part of the reason as you mention. But it's also that modern scientific problems are more complex. I used to have a professor that used to say about biology "the easy problems have been solved". While I think that's dismissive to some of the ingenious experiments done in the past, there's some truth to it.
This begs the question. If all science is now structured as big research teams, we'd expect the breakthroughs to come from such teams. That doesn’t necessarily imply that teams are needed.
This ratio has flipped in the past 30 years, from 1994-2023, where 17% prizes were individual, 83% collaborative.
So I'd say yes, collaborative work is increasingly a requirement to do groundbreaking research today. The organizational structures and funding are a part of the reason as you mention. But it's also that modern scientific problems are more complex. I used to have a professor that used to say about biology "the easy problems have been solved". While I think that's dismissive to some of the ingenious experiments done in the past, there's some truth to it.