Star Scientist Falls From The Heavens
A star researcher in electronics at Bell Labs has been fired after an outside review committee found he falsified experimental data.
The committee concluded that Jan Hendrik Schon, 32, made up or altered data at least 16 times between 1998 and 2001 — the first case of scientific fraud in the 77-year history of the Nobel Prize-winning laboratory, Lucent Technologies said Wednesday. Bell Labs is the research arm of Lucent, which makes telecommunications gear; the labs used to be part of AT&T.
Schon had gained remarkable renown for a scientist his age, publishing papers at a rate far beyond many of his colleagues, since joining Bell Labs as an intern in 1997.
Showing an ability to induce a wide range of physical properties in a novel set of materials, his work led to speculation by some peers that he could one day be nominated for a Nobel Prize, a high honor. His work on a ground-breaking transistor generated a buzz at research labs around the world.
Scientists at rival laboratories, however, had difficulty reproducing the results of Schon's work, thwarting a checks-and-balances process integral to the scientific method. Some noted striking similarities in supposedly random elements of graphs that appeared in his published work.
At IBM Research, Schon's work sparked a rapid response. Scientists there were at first struck by the straightforward tone in a paper whose claims violated the laws of physics as known.
"The paper was written in a way that it's as if these were expected results," said Tom Theis, director of physical sciences for IBM Research, a branch of International Business Machines Corp. "If in fact it had been reproduced, it would have been an absolutely revolutionary transistor device."
In May, Bell Labs formed a committee led by Malcolm Beasley, a professor of applied physics at Stanford University, to investigate allegations of misconduct.
The committee cleared about 20 other researchers from Bell Labs and other institutions who worked on the research or helped write reports on it.
"The evidence that manipulation and misrepresentation of data occurred is compelling," the committee said in a report. Schon "did this intentionally or recklessly and without the knowledge of any of his co-authors."
In a response appended to the report, Schon wrote that he disagreed with several of its findings and conclusions, but "I have to admit that I made various mistakes in my scientific work, which I deeply regret."
Schon blamed some mistakes on the work's complexity or errors he did not notice before publication. But he said all the scientific publications he prepared were based on experimental observations.
A telephone message left at Schon's New Jersey home Wednesday was not immediately returned.
Schon, a German native and a rising star in the field of nanoelectronics, or creating molecule-sized electronic components, cooperated with the investigators and continued his work at the lab until the firing.
The committee wrote that Schon's co-authors, while innocent of misconduct, implicitly endorsed the validity of his work. That shows the need for "clear, widely accepted standards" of professional responsibility to ensure the veracity of results with which researchers are associated, the report states.
"It's a very good thing for the various people and organizations in science to look at this," Beasley said. "It's not something that the community has thought through."
Bell Labs spokesman Saswato Das said laboratory officials are taking several steps to prevent misconduct, including encouraging more internal discussion and peer review of new research before it is published and clarifying supervisors' responsibilities for reviewing all research papers.
"Scientific freedom, like all freedom, can be abused," Das said. "Bell Labs and the scientific community have an honor code that assumes honest and ethical representation of one's work."