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SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT
Like the mythical Icarus, whose waxen wings melted when he flew too close to the sun, the soaring career of Jan Hendrik Schon came crashing down to Earth last week. Schon, a 32-year-old physicist at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, faked experimental results in at least 17 published papers, according to a report released 25 September by a panel of independent investigators. Schon had been fired from Bell Labs the previous evening, after officials there received the report. The findings mark this as one of the most extensive cases of scientific misconduct in modern history and signal a low-water mark for Bell Labs, an institution already reeling from economic troubles of its parent company, Lucent Technologies.
"It's a big train wreck and very sad," says Lydia Sohn, a Princeton University physicist who was one of the first to point out Schon's apparent manipulation of data. "But this shows that the system of checks and balances in science works." Others were less consoled. "If this guy [had been] a little less blatant, he could have succeeded. That's the terrifying thing," says Paul McEuen, a physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
The panel cleared Schon's coauthors of any direct scientific misconduct. But it left open questions that are likely to reverberate through scientific circles for years to come. Chief among them are whether papers Schon coauthored that were not reviewed by the committee are valid and whether Schon's coauthors, the journals that published his papers, or scientific referees should have caught the fraud earlier. "There are other questions, and they are for others to address," says Stanford University physicist Malcolm Beasley, who chaired the panel.
Bell Labs hired Schon as a postdoctoral researcher in 1998 to work with Bertram Batlogg-then Bell's head of solid state physics research-on investigating how electrical charges move through crystals of organic semiconductors. Working with crystal grower Christian Kloc, Schon and Batlogg made rapid progress. Early on, they reported a new way to inject large electric currents into their organic crystals. That advance produced an extraordinary string of effects, including superconductivity, the fractional quantum Hall effect, and laserlike behavior. "He rediscovered everything in condensed matter physics in the last 60 years" in organic materials, Sohn says.
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