Jan Hendrik Schön joined Bell Labs in 1998, just before finishing his Ph.D. in Konstanz, Germany. His international move was typical; the physics community is a far-flung network within which virtually all practicing researchers have connections to specialists in other countries.

But if physics is global, the United States is its financial center. There are more scientists doing expensive experiments in the U.S. than in any other country. Most work at universities as professors, but walking in step with faculty members, attending the same conferences and publishing in the same journals are corporate-funded researchers at places like Xerox, IBM and Bell Labs.

Like university departments, science labs operated by giant corporations depend on income from the larger entity (the university maintains its departments, while the corporation maintains its lab). Both also receive government money, often to conduct joint ventures. Together, the schools and the corporations make up one large academic community.

Bell Labs, formerly operated by AT&T, is the most famous of all corporate science centers. In 77 years of existence, the Labs have hired top-flight scientists from universities and essentially turned them loose to look into whatever they've wanted, with the corporation footing the bill. If their discoveries had practical use, that was great. Otherwise, the science was, like much university-based research, a contribution to common knowledge.

Researchers at Bell Labs were like professors without teaching and other administrative responsibilities. Given up-to-date equipment, funding and generous salaries, these scientists were pointed in the direction of the unknown and encouraged to work together to explore it.

The results of this policy have been impressive: Bell Labs scientists have won numerous Nobel prizes and other awards. But since AT&T decided in 1996 to split into software and hardware companies -- with the latter, Lucent Technologies, retaining Bell Labs -- the facility has fallen upon hard times. The Schön affair is a black eye on an already battered company. Lucent lost a staggering $8 billion last quarter, and laid off thousands of employees.

Schön himself was set to leave Bell Labs, to become a director at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, but the job offer was withdrawn when the scandal broke. When the news of the duplicated graphs first became public, Schön defended himself vigorously. Now he's in silent limbo, waiting for the Beasley panel to issue its findings. He did not respond to a request for an interview for this article.

The duplicated graphs are not the only smoking gun. There's also the serious problem that despite numerous attempts, no other physicist has repeated Schön's results. If no one else can repeat the results of an experiment, both experiment and experimenter come under suspicion. "It is part of the process of science," says investigative committee head Beasley, "that things get winnowed out because they don't work."

Physicist Art Ramirez of Los Alamos National Laboratory once told Science that Schön had "magic hands." Now, says Ramirez, "I'm less sure. I'm getting less comfortable" with Schön's work. Schön himself appears to have lost his magic touch. He told Science in the wake of the controversy that he was "trying as hard as [I] can" to duplicate his own results, but somehow the experiments don't work for him anymore.

They haven't been working for other scientists, either. Physicists around the country and the world have spent tens of millions of dollars -- including funding from the U.S. Department of Energy -- trying to reproduce Schön's key results. Taxpayers have footed the bill for two years' worth of fruitless and expensive efforts. "It seemed so plausible," sighs Arthur Hebard of the University of Florida. "Almost too good to be true." Now Hebard wonders, "What's the trick?"

There are an estimated 100 laboratory groups working on Schön's results in the United States and around the world. For graduate students basing their Ph.D. research on Schön's experiments, their education is at stake. Postdoctoral fellows worry about their prospects for future employment. Some junior professors have tied their bids for tenure to experiments based on Schön's findings. Their professional livelihoods are literally at risk. If the results are fake, how can these people get their careers back? Invoking recent headlines, UCLA's Heath commented that "This is like the opposite of losing your retirement." Asked one nervous faculty member, "Can we get a class action suit together?"

When Martin Fleischmann and B. Stanley Pons suddenly walked out of the University of Utah chemistry department in 1989 claiming that they had solved our energy problems by producing a "cold fusion" reaction (the heat of such reactions has reserved them for hydrogen bombs), scientists showed by straightforward calculation that the experiment couldn't work. Not surprisingly, no one could repeat the results the two claimed. Though the matter received a lot of media coverage, it was a case of routine exposure of a couple of unknowns.

Schön's work has also never crossed the repeatability threshold. Skepticism about it was rising before the scandal broke. By the time his colleague McEuen helped find the duplications, says Cornell's Dan Ralph, "We were having serious doubts about the science." UCLA's Heath described how when a Schön paper would come out, he would get excited, but after a while "I would begin worrying a little bit." Sohn, who worked with McEuen to make the matter public, says, "The data were too clean. They were what you'd expect theoretically, not experimentally. People were getting frustrated because no one could reproduce the results, and it was hitting a crescendo."

Many physicists now wonder about Schön's incredible productivity. "I am guilty of extreme gullibility," says Nobel laureate Philip Anderson. "I have to confess it. We should all have been suspicious of the data almost immediately." Ramirez of Los Alamos says, "I find it hard to even read that many papers, much less write them."

Why would Schön rush to publish dubious results if he knew others would attempt to repeat his experiments? Perhaps, says Heath, Schön was "innocent and naive," like Utah's Fleischmann and Pons. One physicist gave voice to a darker possibility: "If the results are fraudulent, Schön would have to have some kind of psychological problem."

Recent Stories