Jan Hendrik Schön

German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön was born in the town of Verden a der Aller in Lower Saxony in 1970. Schon briefly rose to fame and earned popularity as he made advances in semiconductors, but it was eventually discovered that the discoveries were made fraudulently. Schon had achieved great success and was even given three honors for his achievements, including the Braunschweig Prize in 2001 and the Otto Klung Weberbank Prize for Physics. He also received the Materials Research Society’s Outstanding Young Investigator Award; all the awards were rescinded after it was found out that his achievements were fraudulent. After the discovery of the scandal, a debate concerning the responsibility of the reviewers and co-authors of scientific journals. The discussion was primarily based on the idea of using the traditional peer reviewing to ascertain the relevance of the articles. The method should also be used to detect errors and originality of the scientific articles; the debate also presented an idea for a secure system to be developed to determine whether the article is legit and not a fraud.

Schon concentrated on nanotechnology and real matter physics. In 1997, he received a Ph.D. from the Konstanz University, soon after graduating with the Ph.D. in the same year he got a job at the Bell Labs. Bell Labs is an electronic company that is located in New Jersey, USA, in the company he worked in the electronics department. Here, the semiconductor material that was conventionally used was silicon; they were replacing the material with crystalline organic materials. The company is a pioneer in the transistor manufacturing industry, the company is known for manufacturing and innovating new technologies in the semiconductor industry. The semiconductor devices are created in such a way that allows them to be switched on or off. Schon made a claim that he had detected a new behavior that had not been found and that was beyond the on or off. He carried out measurements that showed predictions that were theoretical, for instance, he revealed that the organic materials could achieve superconductivity or they can be used in lasers. These findings were published in prominent scientific journals, and many scholars around the world were interested in the research. However, the research groups that tried to carry out the research did not arrive at any tangible results as Schon had put it.

Schon achieved another milestone in 2001; he was listed as a scientific journals author. On average he released a paper every eight days, his works were studied all around the globe. However, no researcher ever found the results that he had stated. In one of his articles in Nature journal, he announced that he had managed to produce a transistor using a molecular scale. He said that he had used a layer of organic materials to create an electric current that behaved like a conductor when an electric current was passed through it. There was a lot of excitement; many researchers believed that time had come for the semiconductor industry to move from using silicon elements to using organic materials. It could mean that much smaller semiconductors could have been developed, this is because natural elements can be broken into smaller units as compared to the silicon element. The cost of electronics could also have been reduced.

Schon claimed to use laboratory equipment at the University of Konstanz to create the semiconductors from organic materials. Researchers around the globe used the laboratory facilities that he was using, but they could not achieve same results as Schon claimed, even after following the procedures that he gave. It is after much investigations and research that it was discovered that Schon had been a fraud throughout (Resnik & David, 2014). Any group of researchers did not make the level of quality that he claimed he had achieved when using aluminum oxide layers.

It was his publication on single molecule semiconductors that raised eye brows. Other investigators in the physics community looked at the findings and claimed that it had anomalies. One of the researchers who found an anomaly was Lydia Sohn who was at the Princeton University; she discovered that two experiments that had been carried out in entirely different temperatures had recorded similar noise, Nature editors raised the concern to Schon who claimed that he had submitted the same graph twice erroneously. Another researcher who found out duplicates in the data provided by Schon was Paul McEuen of Cornell University. McEuen and Sohn found duplicates in the publications that had been published by Schon; this discovery led to a lot of reactions throughout the world. The results led to the start of investigation on Schon, Lucent Technologies the company that ran Bell Labs launched a formal investigation on Schon.

The committee to investigate Schon was headed by Malcolm Beasley of the Stanford University, the committee got information from the co-authors of Schon and took serious note of the information provided by the three key investigators. It also looked at the drafts that Schon had developed and all the data that had disputed, this included the numeric data (Beasley & Malcolm, 2002). The committee found out that Schon had not kept any laboratory notebooks, his raw data files had been erased from his computer, he claimed that it was because of the small hard drive space of the computer. He also did not present his experimental samples; he claimed that they had been discarded or had gotten damaged beyond repair.

The report of the committee was released on 25th September 2002. The committee had leveled 24 allegations of misconduct against Schon, 16 of the claims were scientific malpractices. Mathematical functions generated the graphs that he presented in most of his publications, and he had reused most of his data in the experiments that he had published. Schon alone was found to have committed the misconducts; his co-authors were exonerated by the committee (Resnik & David, 2014). It led to a widespread debate, most people in the scientific community felt that the blame would have also been directed to the co-authors as they share the same credit.

Schon admitted that he had falsified some of the data that he used, he claimed that the substitutions of data could have been made a genuine mistake. Researchers at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center and Delft University of Science and Technology carried out the same experiments but could not achieve the same results as Schon. Even before the research had been made public, research groups around the world were not able to find similar results as Schon from the experiments that they conducted (Engwall & Lars, 2014). He later returned to Germany and started working at an engineering company; his doctoral degree was revoked by the University of Konstanz in 2004 through a press conference. After 2010, Schon sued the university, and a legal battle ensued through different courts till September 2014 when the Federal Constitutional Court upheld the decision of the school. Sanctions were also placed over him by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

In the recent years some scientists have been accused of scientific misconduct, for example, Joachim Boldt, a German anesthesiologist who was a lead researcher in the field of colloids. He was put under criminal investigations as it was found out that he had forged and falsified data in about 90 research studies. Another example is Dr. Gopal Kundu; he is an Indian scientist. He was put under investigations by the NCCS in 2006 after an anonymous email said that he had misrepresented data in a paper that he published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Yoshitaka Fujii is also another researcher that has been found to have committed scientific misconduct. He is a Japanese scientist who was found to have falsified data in 183 scientific publications in 2012 (Van Leeuwen & Luwel, 2014). It is the highest number of research publications that have been retracted by a single author.

I believe that Schon most likely cheated from college or the graduate school. There is no record to show this; it means that he did not see any repercussions of falsifying data and cheating. It led him to cheat on his scientific studies which resulted at the end of his career. The university revoked his doctoral degree from him after they had conducted research, they might have found out that he had cheated from the graduate school.

References

Beasley, Malcolm R. “Report of the Investigation Committee on the possibility of Scientific Misconduct in the work of Hendrik Schon and Coauthors.” Lucent Technol. 25 (2002): 1.

Engwall, Lars. “On the quality of quality assessments.” Bibliometrics. Use and Abuse in the Review of Research Performance (2014): 95-106.

Resnik, David B. “Scientific misconduct and research integrity.” Handbook of global bioethics. Springer Netherlands, 2014. 799-810.

Resnik, David B. “Integrity in Scientific Research.” The Routledge Companion to Bioethics (2014): 162.

Van Leeuwen, T., and M. Luwel. “An in-depth analysis of papers retracted in the Web of Science.” STI 2014 Leiden (2014): 337.