The company that employed Dr. Hendrik Schoen: his findings were a fraud
Tamara Traubman
Until about six months ago, Dr. Hendrik Schoen was considered a promising young scientist, who was going to be a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Findings in the field of physics that he published in 16 scientific articles - among other things on the production of microscopic transistors the size of a few individual molecules - were defined in the scientific community as a breakthrough and aroused admiration and astonishment. Now it turns out that Sean's research was actually a fraud.
The scam was reported yesterday by the "Bell Laboratories" company that employed Shawn. The company fired him after the fraud was discovered. In the report submitted by an investigative committee appointed by the company, it was determined that Shawn falsified and even falsified the findings he published.
Shawn declined to respond to requests for comment. In the response that appeared in the report of the investigative committee, he wrote: "I admit that I made some mistakes in my scientific work, and for that I am deeply sorry (...) However, I would like to state that all scientific publications are based on observations from experiments (...) I am convinced that they are real, although I cannot Prove this before the investigative committee."
According to the report, the falsified findings were published between 2001-1998 and the suspicions against
Sean began to wake up in May, and following them, the company established the investigative committee.
According to committee members, Sean - who worked with many scientists - was successful for years
To falsify findings in one of the "hottest" fields in science - electronics
the molecular. Scientists working in the field, trying to develop electronic components
From individual molecules, they now fear that the negative publicity will damage their reputation
and in the financial funding that will be dedicated to the field.
The company defined the affair as "a private case committed by a single person". however,
The report raises several ethical questions regarding the company's conduct in the case. Among other things, the report does not address the question of whether high-level managers should have noticed the signs earlier. The commission also acquitted all 20 investigators who worked with Sean of complicity in the crime or knowledge of the fraud.
"This is very serious," says Hagit Messer-Yeron, professor of electronic engineering and the chief scientist of the Ministry of Science. "On every scientist-partner
There is a guarantee that each of his articles meets scientific standards. How do you put your name on an article without taking responsibility for it?", she wonders. According to her, "Bell employees have a guilt that is no less than that of the others."
However, although the committee chose to place the full blame on Shawn, the affair also tainted other factors: his research colleagues, who did not notice that something was not right; the scientific journals, which critics say made too quick a decision in publishing the sensational findings; Bell's parent company, "Lucent" - the largest telephony equipment manufacturer in the USA - which was hit hard by the economic crisis and laid off tens of thousands of workers.
The scam also raises fundamental questions about the scientific process, where scientists criticize each other's work, and look for mistakes, but start from the premise that the raw data is real. The committee examined 24 articles in relation to which Shawn was accused of inappropriate scientific behavior and found him guilty of 16 of them. Suspicions arose after frustrated scientists, who were unable to reproduce Sean's results in their laboratory, informed the company of their suspicions (Sean's reply was: "It is difficult to develop control with these methods").
Sean's extraordinary power also raised doubts about his findings: in 2001, he published an average of a scientific article every eight days. A scientist who publishes a few individual articles every year is considered a prolific scientist.
The committee hinted that it is possible that Dr. Bertram Betlog, former head of research in solid state physics at Bell Labs, who hired Schon in 1998 as a postdoctoral researcher, should have examined Schon's data more critically. Betlog, who today works at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, was signed as the lead author on many of the articles.
According to the report, with the exception of one case, Shawn's partners were not present at the experiments described in the articles. Usually, organic crystals were grown by his colleagues, and then he would assemble electronic devices from them.
Sean told the committee that he deleted almost all the files with the original data because he lacked computer space to store them. He said he doesn't have a notebook for the lab. He also failed to reproduce any of the findings for the committee. Dr. Schon was born in Germany, and began working as an intern at Bell in the spring of 1997. A year later, as a postdoctoral researcher, he began to publish a series of studies that astonished many. Among the many discoveries published by Sean, the molecular transistors attracted a lot of attention in particular.
The articles about these discoveries were also the ones that led to his downfall. Sean just started getting careless. In an article published in the scientific journal "Nature" Sean and two colleagues claimed that they had assembled a transistor the thickness of a molecule. Two months later, they published an article in the journal "Science" in which they reported how they made a transistor with a switch made of a single molecule.
However, scientists who did not participate in the study noticed that identical graphs appear in both articles. Sean said he had mistakenly included the wrong graph in the article for "Sceince" and submitted a correction, which was later published.
In May, another scientist, from Cornell University, noticed other identical graphs, which allegedly displayed results from different experiments. He informed Bell Labs, which quickly set up the investigative committee. The committee also found two graphs that presented identically "background noises", which appear in the experiment randomly and therefore there is no chance that they will be the same in different experiments. Other graphs looked too perfect. Indeed, Shawn admitted that in some cases he simply copied curves from mathematical functions to describe the results of his research.
