Not really how science works... Maybe in the movies (or anytime before the ~40s)? It still works this way in more niche fields, but for a lot of fields, I think we've come to a collaborative era.

Nowadays in forefront biomedicine (big data-driven), efforts are more of a puzzle piece. But instead of it being a competition between each group's completed puzzle, the goal is to complete a very large puzzle that would be impossible to complete by individual groups. Think of it like detectives all over the world working on an international serial killer case--you don't want to greedily hoard valuable info to hoard credit/fame, and it's more important than we catch the killer as soon as we can so we try to publish findings to the public as soon as we feasibly can.