It reminds me of Jan Hendrik Schön, who looked like physics' next emerging all-star wunderkind until his "discoveries" of crystalline semiconductors won him so many awards and so much attention that it was discovered his entire career had been built on falsified data. A huge embarassment for Bell Labs and a black mark on the final years of more than one great physicist's careers there, since so many people thought they were helping a great new mind succeed when they were in reality perpetuating his fraud.

There's a great 3-part documentary on youtube about it, which argues Schön was probably a contender for the Nobel Prize in Physics before everything collapsed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64