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Jan Hendrik Schön

(Redirected from Jan Hendrik Schön scandal)

Jan Hendrik Schön (born 1970) is a German physicist who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs, which were later discovered to be fraudulent. The Schön scandal provoked discussion in the scientific community about the degree of responsibility of coauthors and reviewers of scientific papers. It was disturbing to some that none of Schön's misrepresentations were caught by the peer review process, which is designed to find errors rather than detect fraud.

Schön's field of research was condensed matter physics and nanotechnology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Konstanz in 1997. In December 2000, he was hired by Bell Labs.

In the period from 1998 to the summer of 2001, he was listed as an author on an average of one research paper every eight days. In 2001 he announced in Nature that he had produced a transistor on the molecular scale. He 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.

Soon after he published his work, others in the physics community alleged that Schön's data contained anomalies. In particular, they said the data seemed overly precise and that some of it contradicted the prevailing understanding of physics. Professor Lydia Sohn, of the University of California at Berkeley, noticed that two experiments carried out at very different temperatures had identical noise. When the editors of Nature pointed this out to Schön, 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 Schön's work. In total, 25 papers by Schön and 20 coauthors were considered suspect.

In May, 2002, Bell Labs appointed Professor Malcolm Beasley of Stanford University to chair a committee to investigate possible scientific fraud. The committee sent questionnaires to all of Schön's coauthors, and interviewed his three principal coauthors (Zhenan Bao, Bertram Batlogg, and Christian Kloc). They examined electronic drafts of the disputed papers, which included processed numeric data. They requested copies of raw data but found that Schön had kept no laboratory notebooks. His raw data files had been erased from his computer. According to Schön, 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.

On September 25, 2002, the committee publicly released its report. The report contained details of 24 allegations of misconduct. They found evidence of Schön's scientific misconduct in at least 16 of them. They found that whole data sets were reused in a number of different experiments. They also found that some of his purportedly experimental results had been produced using mathematical functions.

The report found that all of the misdeeds had been performed by Schön alone. All coauthors were completely exonerated of scientific misconduct. However, it was unclear whether all of them had exercised sufficient professional responsibility in trusting the integrity of his data. Minor coauthors were found to have reasonably fulfilled their responsibilities, but the question was raised of whether Bertram Batlogg, the leader of Schön's research group, might not have been sufficiently critical. Although Batlogg took appropriate action once concerns were explicitly raised to him, perhaps he should have more closely examined the results earlier, in view of their exceptional nature. However, there existing no general consensus on the responsibility of coauthors of a paper, the committee declared itself unqualified to resolve this issue. Batlogg was not formally reprimanded.

Bell Labs fired Schön on the day they received the report. It was the first case of fraud in the lab's history.

On October 31, 2002, Science withdrew 8 papers written by Schön. On March 5, 2003, Nature withdrew 7 papers written by Schön.

Schön acknowledged that the data was incorrect in many of these papers. He claims that the substitutions could have occurred by honest mistake. He admits to falsifying some data but states he did so to show more convincing evidence for behaviour that he observed. He continues to maintain that his experiments worked, and that molecular-sized transistors are possible using the techniques he used.

Experimenters at Delft University of Technology and the Thomas J. Watson Research Center have since performed experiments similar to Schön's. They did not obtain similar results.

He was deprived of his doctoral degree by the University of Konstanz in June 2004.

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Last updated: 05-15-2005 22:23:43