The committee placed the blame for the deceit on one Bell Labs scientist, J. Hendrik Schoen. Bell Labs immediately fired Schoen, 32, who a year ago had been thought to be on a fast path to a Nobel Prize.
http://www.iht.com/articles/71933.html

I guess scientists aren't inherently any more honest than the rest of us.
Any way, those molecule sized transistors would have been sweet.
Just think of what you could do with that kind of miniaturization.
Maybe they are still out there, but further in the future than we thought.