TRAGEDY is the only word that adequately describes the four years that Henrik Schön spent at Bell Labs in New Jersey. Here was a young man on a roll in one of the world’s most prestigious labs. The discovery of a novel way to inject electric charge into organic crystals enabled him to turn insulators into conductors and raise the temperature at which buckyballs superconduct by more than 100 °C. He went on to create transistors out of a single molecules. Everything he touched turned to gold.
Until last week, that is, when an independent panel employed by Bell Labs concluded that much of his data was fabricated. Reactions from physicists ranged from disbelief to sorrow. Disbelief because Schön’s papers promised revolutions in plastic electronics, high-temperature superconductivity and nanotechnology; now no one knows where the frontiers in these fields really lie. Sorrow not only for Schön, whose motives are still unclear, but also for the many researchers who tried to replicate his findings – virtually all without success. Many feel foolish, too, for not spotting Schön’s manipulations sooner.
Meanwhile, Schön seems to be taking the fall for his actions alone (see “Rising Star of electronics found to have fabricated his ground-breaking results”). Bell Labs sacked him, saying this was the first time in 77 years that anyone there had broken the “scientific honor code”. Editors at Science and Nature, which published 13 of Schön’s disputed papers, argue that the events have not exposed flaws in their peer review systems. Bertram Batlogg, Schön’s mentor and senior author on many of his papers, has been unavailable for comment since the report’s publication.
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Yet when rogue operators are exposed, the failings are rarely theirs alone. In the mid-1990s, when Nick Leeson toppled Barings Bank with unathorised derivatives dealing, the blame spread far and wide. He had been given too much latitude in which to operate. Some of his managers, Barings’s supervisory structure and even the Bank of England’s system for monitoring banks were all called to account.
So, was Schön also given too much latitude? Many of the ideas for Schön’s work came from Batlogg, yet the investigating panel shows that he did not see any of these ground-breaking experiments performed. Only one of Schön’s collaborators ever did. What were they thinking? Schön’s were spectacular findings, worthy of the toughest scrutiny. Yet there seems to have been a failure of the curiosity and scepticism that are essential to science.
Bell Labs must also shoulder some blame. When Schön met the panel of investigators, he couldn’t produce lab notes or computer files showing his raw data. In many labs, it is standard practice for a senior researcher to sign off the lab notes of postdocs, or for experimental results to be stored somewhere that is open to all. This clearly did not happen in Schön’s case. Bell Labs announced last week that it would look again at its policies for publishing experimental work and encourage more rigorous internal peer review.
And what of the journals? Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science, reiterated his view that peer review has never been expected to detect scientific fraud. Maybe, but the anomalies in some of Schön’s papers to Science and Nature were hardly subtle: in one, he used the same curve to represent the behaviours of different materials, and in another he presented results that had no errors whatsoever. Both journals stress that papers are chosen on technical merit and reviewers for their technical skills. Should not the manuscript editors or reviewers have remarked on these discrepancies? These papers were, after all, making claims of huge importance to industry and academia.
Ultimately, Schön was unmasked by scientists not engaged in formal peer review. This, some people argue, shows that physics can regulate itself. But it was four years before his actions were discovered, during which some researchers have wasted money and their careers chasing rainbows. The episode has damaged the public’s confidence in science – especially physics. Governments and companies will be wary of investing in plastic electronics and nanotechnology. And the conditions that created Schön – the replacement of curiosity with the pressure to publish whenever possible and to find commercial breakthroughs – are spreading everywhere. Physicists need to investigate these issues. If nothing else, it’s time for them to follow biologists and create a system for preventing and investigating scientific misconduct.
