Physicists Question Safeguards, Ponder Their Next Moves

RE D IT :( LE FT ) LE RO Y S A N C H EZ /L A N L Recent revelations about questionable data in a handful of papers by Bell Laboratories physicist Jan Hendrik Schön and colleagues continued to reverberate throughout the condensed matter physics community last week. Researchers both inside and outside Bell Labs—the research arm of Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, New Jersey—are asking whether formal peer review at journals and an informal review system at Bell Labs should have raised concerns earlier. And several teams have already begun to scale back efforts to extend the pioneering work that is now in doubt. Chemists and physicists were talking about little else last week. “I’m trying to find an e-mail in my inbox that is not related to Hendrik Schön,” says Charles Marcus, a physicist at Harvard University. Schön, 31, has pioneered two separate fields over the last few years: using transistors to inject a high density of electric charges into organic and inorganic crystals to study new physics, and creating molecular-scale transistors. Both aspects of the work came under scrutiny 3 weeks ago when outside researchers presented Bell Labs officials with evidence of possible manipulation of data in five separate papers published over 2 years (Science, 24 May, p. 1376). Schön was the only co-author who was on all five papers and was the first author on each. Since then, researchers combing the literature have turned up nine more figures from eight other papers that appear to share unusual similarities.* Last week Schön, who stands by his results and says it’s not surprising that similar measurements produce similar graphs, announced that he would hold off on publishing papers currently in press. On 10 May, Bell Labs set up a five-member panel of independent researchers to investigate the concerns. That panel is expected to take months to reach its conclusions, which Bell Labs officials say will be made public. In the meantime, researchers are asking whether the troubling data should have been caught earlier. The questions are particularly acute within Bell Labs. According to Bell Labs physicist Robert Willett, researchers there typically send papers to a selection of peers be-