This example of scientific fraud quite surprised me. I've never thought that it can be so big,
"successful" and last so much time...
I'm talking about German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, who was famous in the field of semiconductors, until he was caught. He claimed to make breakthroughs in semiconductors, which could have change completely the industry. Before he was caught he received several awards as young successful researcher with a bright future. Of course, later all rewards were revoked.
In his papers he claimed that he was able to use organic materials instead of silicon and other conventional materials. Later he also declared that he built a transistor on the molecular scale, using thin layer of organic molecules. This was a huge breakthrough with grand opportunities of building organic electric circuits. Unfortunately, all of it was a lie.
How he was caught? Of course many researcher were trying to repeat his "extraordinary" experiments and obtain the same results. But what a surprise - none of them could do it. This attracted additional attention to his papers, and finally Lydia Sohn, the researcher from Princeton University, pointed out that in his graphics the noise is identical for different temperatures. He explained by mistakenly submitting the same graph twice. But it was too late.
After investigation 16 of 24 misconducts were proved. Very convenient for him he didn't use any notebooks and all electronic copies were erased due to a small space in hard drive of his computer. Poor guy, he had to publish results and then erase them from computer...
More interestingly, all coauthors were freed from the scientific misconduct. This started a discussions of responsibility of coauthors and reviewers.
He finished his career with a such shame. After all investigations and proves of his scientific frauds, his doctoral degree was revoked and he lost rights to be peer reviewer and apply for funds in 8 years.
And now I'm thinking how he was going to explain that no one could repeat his experiments? What he was thinking of? Also how he could last so long and publish 36 papers in such famous scientific journals like Nature, APL, Physical Review, Science...
"successful" and last so much time...
I'm talking about German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, who was famous in the field of semiconductors, until he was caught. He claimed to make breakthroughs in semiconductors, which could have change completely the industry. Before he was caught he received several awards as young successful researcher with a bright future. Of course, later all rewards were revoked.
In his papers he claimed that he was able to use organic materials instead of silicon and other conventional materials. Later he also declared that he built a transistor on the molecular scale, using thin layer of organic molecules. This was a huge breakthrough with grand opportunities of building organic electric circuits. Unfortunately, all of it was a lie.
How he was caught? Of course many researcher were trying to repeat his "extraordinary" experiments and obtain the same results. But what a surprise - none of them could do it. This attracted additional attention to his papers, and finally Lydia Sohn, the researcher from Princeton University, pointed out that in his graphics the noise is identical for different temperatures. He explained by mistakenly submitting the same graph twice. But it was too late.
After investigation 16 of 24 misconducts were proved. Very convenient for him he didn't use any notebooks and all electronic copies were erased due to a small space in hard drive of his computer. Poor guy, he had to publish results and then erase them from computer...
More interestingly, all coauthors were freed from the scientific misconduct. This started a discussions of responsibility of coauthors and reviewers.
He finished his career with a such shame. After all investigations and proves of his scientific frauds, his doctoral degree was revoked and he lost rights to be peer reviewer and apply for funds in 8 years.
And now I'm thinking how he was going to explain that no one could repeat his experiments? What he was thinking of? Also how he could last so long and publish 36 papers in such famous scientific journals like Nature, APL, Physical Review, Science...
Amazing, isn't it? This was a very clever guy that published things that he didn´t do but were very likely to be possible, therefore his expectation was that someone else could actually do it, but his invention would get the credit of being the first one. The ability to cheat to the best journals (and therefore reviewers) several times means that he knew very well the standards of publication and also the details of the field he was mocking.
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