Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Six months ago, Jan Hendrik Schön seemed like a slam dunk nominee for a Nobel prize. Then some of his colleagues started to take a closer look at his research.
Sep 16, 2002 | In February 2000, a promising young physicist named Jan Hendrik Schön published some startling experimental results. Schön and his partners had started with molecules that don't ordinarily conduct electricity, and claimed they had succeeded in making them behave like semiconductors, the circuits that make computers work. The researchers reported their findings in Science, one of the flagship scientific journals.
The data created an immediate stir. Schön, who works at Lucent Technologies' prestigious Bell Labs, followed that paper up with another, and then another. In his world of "publish or perish," he became a virtual writing machine, issuing one article after another. His group reported that they could make other nonconductors into semiconductors, lasers and light-absorbing devices. These claims were revolutionary. Their implications for electronics and other fields were enormous, holding the promise that computing circuitry might one day shrink to unimaginably small size. In the words of one Princeton professor, Schön had "defeated chemistry." He had become a modern alchemist, apparently conducting electricity where it had never gone before.
In a field where publishing two or three articles a year makes you productive, Schön started issuing reports in bunches. He was the lead author on dozens of articles -- more than 90 in about three years, most of them appearing in the industry-leading journals. In 2001, he received an award for scientific "Breakthrough of the Year," but most scientists saw this recognition as only the beginning.
"I saw these results being presented to a German audience," says James Heath of UCLA, "and they knock on the chairs instead of clapping. It was incredible -- they got a 'standing knocking.' I thought, These guys are going to Stockholm." Less than five years after finishing graduate school, Jan Hendrik Schön was in contention for the Nobel prize.
Then the wunderkind fell to earth. In April, a small group of researchers at Bell Labs contacted Princeton physics professor Lydia Sohn and whispered that all was not right with Schön's data. Sohn recalls that she and Cornell University's Paul McEuen stayed up late one night and found some disturbing coincidences in Schön's results: The same graphs were being used to illustrate the outcomes of completely different experiments. "You would expect differences," she said, "but the figures were identical. It was a smoking gun."
Once tipped off, McEuen started looking closely at a range of Schön's work, enlarging the graphs and playing a game of mix-and-match. He found many duplicate graphs in different papers on different subjects. Schön was apparently using the same sets of pictures to tell lots of different stories.
In May, McEuen and Sohn formally alerted the editors of Science and Nature -- where Schön and his team had published numerous articles -- of the discrepancies. McEuen and Sohn also informed Schön; his supervisor and coauthor, Bertram Batlogg; and Bell Labs management that they were blowing the whistle. Schön immediately insisted that his experiments were fine, and that the duplicated figures were a simple clerical error for which he now offered substitutes. To Nature he declared he was "confident" of his results. To Science he said, "I haven't done anything wrong." Batlogg mostly said nothing at all. A scandal had broken out in the world of physics.
Lucent Technologies, which runs Bell Labs, responded swiftly. Cherry Murray, head of physical science research, acted with other Bell Labs officials and appointed an independent committee to look into the matter. The panel was made up primarily of university physics professors, led by Malcolm Beasley of Stanford. Their mandate, according to Beasley, is to get the facts and "find out whether scientific misconduct has occurred." The results of the investigation could be released as soon as this week.
"Big Physics" is a small world. Very few people can understand, let alone judge, what experimental physicists do. They work in close professional communities of specialists and subspecialists, conducting expensive experiments and publishing papers with names like "Gate-induced Superconductivity in a Solution-Processed Organic Polymer Film."
But physics is also a field in which millions of taxpayer dollars are spent every year. Now physics has an accountability problem and the only possible auditors are other physicists. As the field reels from what may be the biggest fraud in its history, scientists across the world are alarmed: Bad science can cost lives -- think of the untested O-rings on the space shuttle Challenger that froze stiff and caused the ship's tragic explosion. But what about phony science?
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