Organic Transistor Fraud

davej

Did anyone watch the Horizon programme last night?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3459769.stm

It's amazing how these people remain undiscovered for years. It makes you wonder about how much of it is going on elsewhere. How much science is being built on a house of cards ?

davej

Stark

I'd say quantum computing for one. "If we don't observe the results then they can be anything! Wow!".

Very surprised to hear this, Schoen did a hell of a lot of stuff as mentioned in the article, in college we're referred to work by him. Considering the practical applications of so much of his work it couldn't all have been false ??? Perhaps he was just really careless and lazy in verifying his results.

Beruthiel

Originally posted by davej
Did anyone watch the Horizon programme last night?

ya
watched it
how is it that there are no checks when someone writes a paper like this?
surely you need some sort of verification to prove that your experiments work?

mr_angry

It seems he was very, very good at hiding away this secret, and judging by his comment at the very end (that he would eventually be "vindicated"), he seems to be of the belief that he did nothing wrong. People like that can be very hard to discredit.

I guess we just have to have faith in scientists like the two people who discovered his matching graphs. I'm also willing to bet that "Science" and "Nature" magazines will be more thoroughly comparing their articles in future...

GuanYin

Originally posted by davej
It makes you wonder about how much of it is going on elsewhere. How much science is being built on a house of cards ?

davej

A while back one researcher was found to have taken 3 previous publications, changed the names of the drug compounds and a few other components and submitted them for publication with various journals.

They were published but the fraud was discovered by one of the original publishers and the papers were all withdrawn. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens alot.

dudara

Schon's earlier work seems to be sound, and my boyfriend's PhD work has covered some of the compounds Schon generated such interest in, and there does seem to be some merit, but nowhere near what Schon implied. Hundred's of PhD students and scientists have tried replicate his work and failed, wasting valuable time and money.

The thing is that all us physicists and and other experimental scientists are trained to keep log books and never to delete data. The concept of not doing that is completely abhorrent. When he was investigated, he claimed that he had deleted data as he did not have enough disk space to keep it all, and his log books were never produced. At one stage, he was writing a scientific paper once every 8 days, and no-one got suspicious?? Apparently when he was doing his thesis, nothing happened for ages, and then over a relatively short period of time, it came together. Hmm..

The fact is, Schon might truly believe that what he claimed was correct, but he had to fabricate the data to prove it. His theories might be proved right in the end, but, this incident has really served to highlight the poor standards of paper peer reviewing present even in some of the best journals in the world

cerebus

Here's an earlier thread on this - has a link to an IEEE Spectrum article which gave some detail on the story. I didn't see Horizon, so it may have covered all the material in this article.

Originally posted by dudara
this incident has really served to highlight the poor standards of paper peer reviewing present even in some of the best journals in the world

I'd almost claim the opposite - while the reviewers for the various journals may not have caught this fraud, I'd say it proved the scientific process worked. His claims were published, people were able to check his results and disprove his findings.

Think about it - that's the way the process is supposed to work. It would prove very hard for a set of reviewers to duplicate all the experiments described in a paper (which may have taken years to conduct) in the short time frame they have to conduct the review. A reviewer has to compare the data in a paper with their knowledge of the field - and none of Schon's claims seemed to be outlandish (I think they fit the theory almost too perfectly in fact ). Is a reviewer supposed to disbelieve all papers? I don't know whether you've reviewed anything for a journal or conference, but often you'll be sent a paper that is in your general area but not a sub-specialisation that you are very familiar with. In that case, a paper may look okay to you but upon examination by experts working in that sub-area can show problems.

I think the reviewers did what needed to be done - put the results and the background/supporting work in the public domain and let everyone check the results.

In this case I would put a lot of blame on the co-authors who signed their names to the work (many of them stars in the field). They should have satisfied themselves that the work with which they were being credited was everything it claimed to be.

I'd also wonder what made JHS think he wouldn't get found out. Work like that was bound to get people excited. He should have known that other teams would start using his work as a stepping stone - and that they would discover that there was something wrong as soon as they started trying to duplicate it.

Capt'n Midnight

Not so sure I'd like a single molocule transistor - cosmic rays and all that.

Years back there were some very dodgy stuff printed up under the "publish or perish" enviroment - you get grants and tenure based on your published work.

In one of the really badly done reports some dogs were described as doing well after the expirement - despite being sacrificed half way through. (Nature ?)

dudara

His claims were rather outlandish, such as lasing from a crystalline slab of material. What surprises me even more is that his supervisor Battlog never saw any of the experiments working. He happily accepted and promoted Schon's results. Such negligence is unbelievable.