Scientific Fraud

cerebus

Just looking for opinions on the recent revelations of what looks to be scientific misconduct from Bell Labs...

One of Bell Labs' star researchers, who was churning out papers at the rate of almost one a week, looks to have falsified a load of his results.

You can find some background on the whole saga here - the researcher, Jan Hendrik Schon, claimed to have made major discoveries in a bunch of fields including superconductivity in fullerenes and polymers, organic field-effect transistors, and a one-molecule transistor. Some of these might have been Nobel prize worthy.

It is pretty interesting - the scientific process seems to have worked, with bogus results being discredited (eventually - it seems that it took some time in this case!). I'd also wonder why his supervisor/mentor, a guy called Batlogg, didn't get implicated further...

On a side note, it looks like some of the really cool things that Schon published (work on carbon-based transistors and the like) might need more work - Lucent (who run Bell Labs) pulled out of a bunch of patents based on Schon's work, such as "an organic, superconducting field-effect switching device" - could be worth following up

Nietzschean

yeah heard about that a while back, going to take years for bell labs reputation to recover, nasty.............

sceptre

They still have all those Nobel prizes to keep them warm at night though (Bell labs researchers took home 10-15 of them if I recall rightly).

Problems for Bell researchers in the future though - for a while they'll almost have to record all their work on camera