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Lucent Reexamines Breakthrough Research

Posted by michael on from the publish-and-perish dept.

s20451 writes "Bell Labs' claims to have manufactured transistors consisting of a single-molecule switch are being met with skepticism in the scientific community, following difficulties in reproducing the experiment. Now a panel has been formed to investigate research misconduct related to not only that claim, but others regarding organic transistors." We've run several stories about the extremely tiny transistors and the innovative ways of assembling them which Lucent has been working on. A reader's summary of a subscriber-only story on Science's website suggests that there is strong evidence that some of the data in the published papers was faked.

2 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Before the bashing begins.... by CHUD-Wretch · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just think where we would be without Lucent (well, Bell Labs in particular)....

    They have invented, among MANY other things...
    "the transistor, the laser and wireless technologies."

    90% of the tech you love and can't live without originated at Bell Labs.
    You know...computers...unix...voice communication...redundant/fault tolerant data networks...etc...

    Oh, and for the patent lovers in tha house...

    "Bell Labs averaged one patent per business day from 1925 to 1995,
    and since March 1996, patents assigned to Lucent have been issued at a rate of more than three per business day."

    (Disclaimer - I do realize this is off topic a little, but I want people to think about how much great tech comes out of there!)

    --
    "Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."
  2. More info of the fraud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    This was submitted yesterday to slashdot, but not posted for some reason...

    For the past two years, a team at Bell Labs/Lucent, led by a young physicist named Jan Hendrik Schon, has published a dizzying array of groundbreaking work in the field of solid-state physics, which has previously
    inspired discussions at Slashdot,
    here
    and here.
    However, as reported tonight in Science (look under
    the "ScienceNow" link), and I'm sure soon in Nature, it may all be a fraud. It looks like Schon has used identical data curves for very different experiments in different papers. The scale of the deception is enormous--there are duplicated graphs in at least 5, and as many as 20, papers. The fallout from this will be huge, not just for Lucent, but for the physics community as a whole, as a large number of these papers made it through the review process at the two most prestigious journals in the natural sciences, Science and Nature.

    For a comparison of two plots from two seperate papers about two seperate experiments with remarbably similar data, check out here here. Scroll down to thursday may 16...

    impacting