In fact, 50 years ago, in his classic book Social Theory and Social Structure, the late sociologist Robert K. Merton described the results of a case study of influential people in a typical American town, Rovere, New Jersey. As a sociologist, he chose this tiny town to study how people relate to each other and influence each other, just as biologists study tiny worms with only a few hundred cells so that they can study how each cell relates to an organism as a whole.