If that was your dream, that's sad. But then, this dreamt-of position is a thing of the past, a privilege that really shouldn't be there, except for a few absolute geniuses. Science is not about employment, or tenure, or grants and funding. It is not about being allowed to do what you like. It is not even about your personal little happiness, but about doing what you feel MUST be done.
Science means generating and using knowledge to solve problems.
In this way, being a scientist is not something that anybody can take away from you. If you tackle problems nobody has solved yet, if you do whatever it takes to solve them, if you believe in the power of reason, you are a scientist. In contrast to what one might have expected in the 60's, the problems of the 21st century will not be the colonization of the solar system but rather reducing environmental pollution, controlling population growth and coping with the depletion of natural resources. While traditional scientific research will help solve these problems, it is fairly clear that the good old scientific discovery alone won't do the trick anymore. Most of our major ills are not primarily due to the lack of scientific and technological knowledge.