I once went through quite an experience. Used to work with a guy that was awarded a big prize in his field. I think one day he got tired of being treated as "some kind of genius", as he said. He started to discuss a topic one day, listening to my answers and questions back and forth. At the end the discussion hit a point where we could not go further. He then told me: "if you then submitted this as a proposal, were lucky enough to have it granted and just answered the last question you asked me with a simple experiment, you would receive the same prize as I did".
You're probably being intentionally vague here to avoid "naming names", but I'd love to hear the actual details of this story: the topic under discussion, the interrogation that lead up to the "point where [you] could go no further", what the last question was, and what a simple experiment to answer it would look like.
Probably underestimates it. Not my field, I don't know of this guy but a few hundred citations is you write a library that everyone uses and similar academic recognition and academic platinum for tenure on the background of other publications. 300 000 is the equivalent of writing the Linux kernel or sqlite.
