Sometimes called "nobelitis," the term "Nobel disease" refers to a tendency for Nobel Prize-winning scientists to go off on wild, often irrational or pseudoscientific tangents following their acquisition of this coveted (by some measures, the most-coveted of all scientific recognitions) designation.
The 1954 Nobel Price award winner for chemistry, Linus Pauling, went from researching the chemical bond to studying (with lackadaisical, and some have claimed essentially non-scientific rigor) the impact of super-high doses of vitamin C on cancer and schizophrenia (his data on this subject is considered to be flawed and borderline uninterpretable).
James Watson, one of the 1962 Nobel Prize winners for his work co-discovering the helix structure of DNA decided that Black people are inherently less intelligent than White people, that obese people are inherently less ambitious than non-obese people, and that dark-skinned people from regions near the equator have latently higher sex-drives than folks (with lighter skin) living further from the equator because the sun—he believed—increases one's sexual urges (all of this has been shown to be unsupportable by any evidence).
Kary Mullis co-won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1993 for creating polymerase chain reactions, then segued into promoting the theory—which he presented as fact—that AIDS is not caused by HIV: something that we know to be absolutely false, and which flew in the face of all the evidence even then.
Nonetheless, he earnestly and repeatedly called the idea that HIV led to AIDS a silly confabulation, comparable in its ridiculousness to the excommunication of Galileo; he basically described himself as the one rational person in the room and compared everyone else who was calling him out for his unsupported ideas to the old-school, violently un-scientific Christian church.
There are many more examples, and most of them follow the same general narrative of a brilliant person doing important, groundbreaking work, eventually being recognized for that work, winning a big, important award, and then spiraling into weirder, at times goofy or even harmful realms of inquiry.
There are several theories as to why this seems to be the case with such regularity.
One theory is that while we often intuitively assume more intelligent people will also be more rational, that's not necessarily the case.
Intelligence and rationality are two entirely different things, and it's perfectly possible for someone who is very bright in a way that makes them good at noticing patterns or making connections within the structure of the scientific establishment will then, when freed of some of those bonds, go on to say and do and believe very strange, unorthodox, and/or ridiculous stuff.
Another is that folks who are told they're brilliant, and in many cases are told they're brilliant by the same people who once told them their work was pointless and would never lead anywhere before declaring them genius heroes, may assume they'll continue to play that role forever.
Thus, if they notice something they consider to be interesting, even if it's an unorthodox idea that everyone tells them is wrong, they may understandably think, well, they said that to me before, didn't they? And eventually my intuitions were shown to be better than their ideologies. So I should probably just ignore them and keep going like last time.
Still another theory posits that people who achieve some level of notoriety, in science or other facets of life, then become the target of more cranks with wild, interesting, but ultimately untrue ideas.
Nobel Prize-winning scientists may have more exposure to wild-eyed but incorrect theories than other scientists, then, and may therefore—because of the sheer numbers involved—have a higher likelihood of falling for some of these ideas. It's a game of chance rather than something to do with their thinking or personalities.
One more theory is connected to us non-Nobel winners, though, rather than the folks who earned this award.
In essence, we tend to notice when Nobel Prize-winning scientists make mistakes and follow false paths more than when other people—including non-Nobel-winning scientists—do the same.
This could be considered a version of what's often called salience bias, where we tend to note more prominent and striking differences over lesser distinctions.
It's more salient, more intuitively important-seeming, when someone of note does something that would seem to conflict with who we perceive them to be.
Thus, a public speaker who fumbles their words will seem more notable than a non-public speaker who does the same, and a Nobel Prize-winning scientist being seduced by pseudoscience stands out for the same reason.
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