So, yes, maybe this guy "could have" been an academic. So what? So could scads and scads of other people---including, at the most obvious level, people who succeeded in school but also had the right stuff for non-academic careers. We don't gaze sadly at the campuses of Google, Microsoft, Harvard Law, the Peace Corps, and the service academies, while saying "One of those people might have otherwise solved the mysteries of physics." Less obviously, or further back, there are umpteenity geniuses who have never taken an IQ test at all; umpteenion whose poverty prevented them from becoming literate to begin with; etc.. Anyone of whom (with different strokes of luck) could have wound up where this guy is, or where you are, or where I am.
It's also a mistake to imagine, I think, that physics is stalled because we're missing the IQ-200 person---the mythical Einstein-figure---who will cut through the problem that our current crop of IQ-150 dullards have gotten stuck on. (With apologies for using IQ as a shorthand for raw intelligence.) I really doubt that that's how it works. Maybe we need to get four of the current 150-folks in a room together. Maybe we all need to sit back and wait for accelerator data.
Maybe we need 1000 patient-but-not-genius sniffer dogs. Each dog spends a decade working their way down one of 1000 otherwise-identical blind alleys, one of which has the answer at the end. Making one of the dogs into a genius superdog ... well, maybe they can explore three alleys per decade instead of just one. Maybe that's how it works.