Re: On Hedrick Shoan's data absent
shinstr said:
As aired on the science channel on nantechnogy, expert Hedrick Shoan?s lab data being faked.May it serve to noted, that since nanotechnogy might turn out to be a self configurable entity, there could be no concurrent data yielded now, that would have made a solid statement concerning the use of nanotechnology applications.
I believe that is :
Jan Hendrik Sch?n
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Jan Hendrik Sch?n (born 1970) is a
German physicist who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs that were later discovered to be fraudulent.
[1] Before he was exposed, Sch?n had received the
Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics in 2001, the
Braunschweig Prize in 2001 and the
Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the
Materials Research Society in 2002.
The
Sch?n scandal provoked discussion in the scientific community about the degree of responsibility of coauthors and reviewers of
scientific papers. The debate centered on whether
peer review traditionally designed to find errors and determine relevance and originality of papers, should also be required to detect deliberate fraud.
Contents
[
hide]
[edit] Rise to prominence
Sch?n's field of research was
condensed matter physics and
nanotechnology.
[2] He received his
Ph.D. from the
University of Konstanz in 1997. In late 1997 he was hired by
Bell Labs.
In 2001 he was listed as an author on an average of one research paper every eight days
[2]. In that year he announced in
Nature that he had produced a
transistor on the molecular scale. Sch?n claimed to have used a thin layer of
organic dye
molecules to assemble an
electric circuit that, when acted on by an
electric current, behaved as a transistor. The implications of his work were significant. It would have been the beginning of a move away from
silicon-based
electronics and towards organic electronics. It would have allowed chips to continue shrinking past the point at which silicon breaks down, and therefore continue
Moore's Law for much longer than is currently predicted. It also would have drastically reduced the cost of electronics.
[edit] Allegations and investigation
As recounted by Dan Agin in his book
Junk Science[3], soon after Sch?n published his work on single-molecule semiconductors, others in the physics community alleged that his data contained anomalies.
Professor Lydia Sohn, then of Princeton University, noticed that two experiments carried out at very different temperatures had identical noise.[2] When the editors of
Nature pointed this out to Sch?n, he claimed to have accidentally submitted the same graph twice. Professor
Paul McEuen of
Cornell University then found the same noise in a paper describing a third experiment. More research by McEuen, Sohn and other physicists, uncovered a number of examples of duplicate data in Sch?n's work. This triggered a series of reactions that quickly led Lucent Technologies (which ran Bell Labs) to start a formal investigation.
[4]
In May 2002 Bell Labs set up a committee to investigate this affair, with Professor
Malcolm Beasley of
Stanford University as chair.
[5] The committee obtained information from all of Sch?n's coauthors, and interviewed the three principal ones (Zhenan Bao, Bertram Batlogg and Christian Kloc). It examined electronic drafts of the disputed papers which included processed numeric data. The committee requested copies of the raw data but found that Sch?n had kept no laboratory notebooks. His raw-data files had been erased from his computer. According to Sch?n the files were erased because his computer had limited hard drive space. In addition, all of his experimental samples had been discarded, or damaged beyond repair.
[2][6]
On
September 25,
2002, the committee publicly released its report.
[5] The report contained details of 24 allegations of misconduct. They found evidence of Sch?n's scientific misconduct in at least 16 of them. They found that whole data sets had been reused in a number of different experiments. They also found that some of his graphs, which purportedly had been plotted from experimental data, had instead been produced using mathematical functions.
[6]
The report found that all of the misdeeds had been performed by Sch?n alone. All the coauthors were completely exonerated of scientific misconduct. It was, however, unclear whether all of them had exercised sufficient professional responsibility in trusting the integrity of his data.
[6]
Bell Labs fired Sch?n on the day they received the report. It was the first known case of fraud in the Lab's history.
[edit] Aftermath and sanctions
Sch?n acknowledged that the data were incorrect in many of these papers.
[7] He claimed that the substitutions could have occurred by honest mistake. He admitted to having falsified some data and stated he did so to show more convincing evidence for behaviour that he observed.
Experimenters at
Delft University of Technology and the
Thomas J. Watson Research Center have since performed experiments similar to Sch?n's. They did not obtain similar results.
[8] Also, before the allegations became public, several research groups tried to reproduce most of the groundbreaking results in the field of the physics of organic molecular materials without success
[4].
In June 2004 the
University of Konstanz issued a press release stating that Sch?n's doctoral degree had been revoked due to "dishonourable conduct". Department of Physics spokesman Wolfgang Dieterich called the affair the "biggest fraud in physics in the last 50 years" and said that the "credibility of science had been brought into disrepute".
[9]
In October 2004, the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, the German Research Foundation) Joint Committee announced sanctions against him. The former DFG post-doctorate fellow was deprived of his active right to vote in DFG elections or serve on DFG committees for an eight-year period. During that period, Sch?n will also be unable to serve as a peer reviewer or apply for DFG funds.
[10]
Professor Lydia Sohn 3:20