Religions fail, Faith and relationship in Christ never fails.
What is the greatest scientific fraud of the past 50 years?
There are have been, unfortunately, several. I’m going to have to go with the odd case of Jan Hendrik Schön.
In the late nineties and early ’00s, Schön was the wunderkind of condensed matter physics and nanotechnology. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1997 he went to work for the prestigious Bell Labs, working on new types of semiconductors. His work revolved around replacing conventional semiconducting materials, like silicon, and replacing them with crystalline organic materials. Now, this is a well-known concept, it is present in field-effect transistors, especially (obviously) organic field-effect transistors and these have gained significant interest in the past decade or so. As they are beginning to compete with inorganic silicon-based MOSFETS and similar technology.
However, what Schön was claiming was….revolutionary. Now, “revolutionary” is a term that is thrown around a lot, it is a buzzword. But what Schön’s papers were showing was literally revolutionary. The on/off numbers were in the superconducting range
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, they could work as lasers, as different types of gates. The only issue was that the results coming out of Bell Labs were hard to replicate.
Then, in 2001 Nature published a paper by Schön where he introduced a molecular transistor, made of organic materials.
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He used organic dye materials that self-assembled into a transistor. No photolithography, no nothing. It’s how they “worked”. This was during a blitz of papers, he was publishing papers once every eight days. If a reader is unfamiliar with the pace of scientific research, Schön was pretty much being a physicist version of Usain Bolt. This is a breakneck pace of publication. One of the papers was the Nature article mentioned above.
It could have changed everything.
I mean that literally, I could have meant the end of silicon's dominance in the field of electrical engineering and a move towards organic substrates. It could have allowed Moore’s law to be extended far beyond its projected limits (we are encountering this right now). It could have changed so much. Our world would not be the same place.
There was only one issue, due to visa issues, Schön was back in Germany at the lab facilities of the University of Konstanz and there was no specific special equipment there, yet physicists elsewhere struggled to replicate the Aluminum-oxide insulating layers that allowed the transistors to function. The sputtering machine that Schön used was at the University of Konstanz, and again, there was nothing special about it. But no one else could replicate the insulating layers. They couldn’t get the process to work.
And so the suspicions began.
The figures were off, other physicists at Bell Labs and those outside of it started to bring attention to the figures. Several graphs were suspiciously similar. Almost…identical. Same with the overall numbers, they were too close, too similar. Then it was noticed that the data was too precise, some of it even contradicted the laws of physics, or at least how physics was then understood.
Then Dr. Lydia Sohn, then at Princeton University and now at the University of California, Berkeley, when reading the papers noticed that two experiments that were carried out at two drastically different temperatures produced the same results. The same figures.
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In this case, the noise was not just similar but identical. When asked, Schön said that he mistakenly submitted the same graph twice. This can (rarely) happen, so it was accepted, at first. Then, Dr. Paul McEuen at Cornell noticed the same thing; the graphs of transistor noise were identical at three different temperatures. Not possible.
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Doctors Sohn and McEuen began to collaborate and they discovered “the smoking gun” as the linked article from The Independent phrased it. 90 papers published and several using the same graphs, the same data. Exactly identical. When asked, Schön said that he didn’t have the original data, that he didn’t keep it. Bell Labs placed Dr. Malcolm Beasley
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in charge of the commission that would investigate the claims that the inconsistencies in his papers were the result of fraud and not of Schön being sloppy.
Dr. Beasley’s commission found 16 verified cases of scientific misconduct. They were detailed in a 127-page report released in 2002
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, in response Jan Hendrik Schön made the following statement:
“I have to admit I made various mistakes in my scientific work which I deeply regret. However, I would like to state that all the scientific publications that I prepared were based on experimental observations.”
Bell Labs was not convinced and promptly fired Jan Hendrik Schön.
This was the first known case of fraud in the history of Bell Labs, and over 15 papers were retracted due to the misconduct. In 2004 the University of Konstanz revoked Schön’s Ph.D., citing “dishonorable conduct”, and the department of physics spokesman Wolfgang Dieterich called the entire scandal, “the biggest fraud in physics of the last 50 years.” And went on to say that “the credibility of science has been brought into dispute.”
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The departmental statement said: “he has strongly damaged the credibility of science to the general public.”
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Schön went on to lose the appeal challenging the stripping of his doctorate. and has since faded from view. His current status is unknown today.
This was big because of the hopes it raised, then dashed. It was big because it caused a remarkable waste of money in labs around the world that tried to replicate his results.
Unfortunately, the biggest impact was the potential damage done to the way science is perceived by the general public. When the public sees this kind of institutional fraud, fraud that took a couple of years to catch and act against, it brings the organized proactive of science into question for a lot of people.
And this type of thinking continues today, as we see an increasing anti-science bias among many people. Legitimate results are questioned, and vaccine nonsense by Wakefield is taken as gospel. How hundreds of scientists can dispute the world of people like Wakefield and that work is dismissed because “well, there has been other fraud before”.
Science is, at the end of the day, a pursuit of truth. Whether those truths are uncomfortable or not, it seeks to know more about the world we live in. As such, it must be dictated by facts and repeatable experimentation. People like Schön weaken the entire system, the faith in the process.
And they make us jaded, we look upon any development with substantial skepticism. This isn’t a bad thing, but it can create inertia to fight against.
There is a positive side to his fraud though; that the scientific community much more aggressively vets data, much more aggressively conducts peer review, and slashes those who don’t make the standard when it comes to data transparency. Schön made us more careful researchers, but perhaps, that made us better.
Sometimes the hardest lessons are the best.