How does family background effect the “termites” as well as Oppenheimer and Lanagan? What overall point is the author trying to make?

Terman identified a group of gifted students by combing through elementary school and high school data. He transformed his monitoring of these students (who came to be known as the "Termites") into a meticulously conducted long-term project. However, Gladwell expresses strong skepticism about whether Terman's focus on IQ directed Terman towards true outliers.

To give readers a sense of IQ testing standards, Gladwell reproduces examples from a visually-based IQ test called the Raven's Progressive Metrics. He warns readers not to confuse the talent required to solve problems with true measures of success; after all, while some IQ increases determine levels of success, additional IQ points beyond 120 do not translate to any meaningful real-world advantage. Gladwell supports this claim by listing recent Nobel Prize Winners in Medicine and Chemistry. Not all of these winners came from the absolutely best-ranked colleges, but all of them came from very good schools that provided firm grounds for academic success.