Lucent Reexamines Breakthrough Research

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.

Comments

Fake results

[brejc8]

It makes me sad when I see companys trying to hype up their research to pump up their share price.

Now when my group does any research which has positive results we are scared to release anything because everyone assumes its simply another con.

Currently we have an asynchronous processor which releases so little EMI it looks dead in the graphs.

We tried showing this to other people but everyone nowdays refuses to beleve anything unconvesional can be good.

Before the bashing begins....

[CHUD-Wretch]

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!)

Lucent!

[sulli]

You've got some 'splainin' to do!

More info of the fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Newsbreak

[MarkusQ]

...but physicists are voicing suspicions about the figures, portions of which seem almost identical even though the labels are different. Particularly puzzling is the fact that one pair of graphs show the same pattern of "noise," which should be random.

Lucent scientists today reported the remarkable discovery that, contrary to conventional wisdom and accepted scientific theory noise isn't random. Said one researcher, "We'd expected self-similarity, due to the fractal nature of noise, but this is amazing!"

Researchers estimate that there are actually less than a dozen examples of true noise, which are repeated endlessly through out nature. Some observers have expressed concerns over the fact that most, if not all of them are already copywritten by the RIAA.

-- MarkusQ

Bell Labs is not just one guy.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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

But remember that Bell Labs is an institution, not an individual. It is composed of MANY scientists. It is not impossible that the barrel has acquired a bad apple. The trick is to find the bad apples and pull them out before they spoil the barrel.

Of course it COULD be that the research in question wasn't faked, with the anomolies coming from a clerical error, a jackpot, or a previously-undiscovered bit of physics. That's why they're INVESTIGATING, rather than just recalling the papers and canning those connected with 'em.

that's how science works nowadays

[dario_moreno]

Look at the space occupied by the Physical Review on the shelves of a library : went from less than 1 meter a year in the 1950's to maybe 20 meters nowadays...and the number of quality scientists has not increased 20fold ! At this time, it was enough to publish a paper once in a while, when a real discovery was made. When looking at the summary of a scientific journal of, say, the 30's, you see Fermi, Einstein, Brillouin, when nowadays articles are just a proof that someone did some work with the money he was given.

The review process has become a joke : either the paper goes to an indirect friend thanks to the editor (submit wisely !), and there is no actual review, or it goes to a concurrent, which makes irrelevant points (in one occurrence I know of, delaying the publication by more than a year making stupid points, and when all the objections were met, asking to change the units, and pointing minor misprints !). The referees usually do not understand the scope or actual point made in a paper, and make the stupidest comments possible (so one of my former bosses recommended to write papers in one afternoon, since the real mistakes would not be spotted anyways). This is also natural because they tend to be flooded by cut-and-paste papers from scientists who are in science only because there is some (ridicully small) money or career to be made, and they could not find a "real" job elsewhere. This is sadly true of the 3rd world, where scientists are underpaid (150$ a month anyone ?) and eagerly look for positions in developed countries, so need published papers, but their lack of money and bad education mean that they often submit utterly uninteresting papers.

This is also true from people under pressure from their supervisors because they are all on short-term contracts, so that they often resort to faking data to get the expected effect. A nice positive result created with the Gimp
(or vi data | gnuplot ) is way nicer than a boring negative result and easier to publish,
even if faked and wrong.

Sometimes the referees even resort to say "
please cite this guy", meaning, "hi, it's me,
hope you do not forget me when I need something or you refer my papers".