Despite this, I know that a lot of professors in top labs do not like you to do reading in the laboratory. Yes - they expect you to read academic papers and know everything - but that is for your own time. When you are in the lab you do experiments (my experience was in genetics/biology). In fact I knew of a lab where you had to leave a note on your bench with your whereabouts if you were going to be away for longer that 10 minutes. These were very successful labs.
They are successful in the sense that they get lots of grant money and the professor has lots of political power in the field. They churn out papers. Thinking back over my reading, though, I'd say they're underrepresented per capita in producing really interesting science. What you are describing is also a peculiarity of biology and some parts of chemistry. It doesn't work that way in physics or in much of engineering.
However, if you're running a megalab and have lots of political clout, it's very important to keep anyone from thinking carefully and trying to look for inconsistencies. Academic empires fall from people doing things like that.
On the other hand, there were only a handful of professors at the Rockefeller University, where I went to grad school, who I respected as scientists. One of them had a Nobel prize. The rest didn't. The rest of the Nobel prize winners in that campus lousy with them you could have defunded and put out to be homeless on the streets and had no real effect on the advance of science.
I wonder who was deciding what to do at the bench and how those decision makers were spending their time. I would be willing to bet they spent a lot of work hours reading up on the latest developments.
