Fraud

When I travel to conferences and universities around the world, when I mention that I used to be at Bell labs, inevitably someone wants to talk about Jan Hendrik Schön. Schön was one of the largest scientific frauds in history – and he was in the office two doors down from me for several years.

Over the span of several years, Schön published about one scientific paper per month in the world’s top two scientific journals –Science and Nature. He was the young star – everything he touched turned to gold. At age 32 he already had an offer to be the director of a Max Planck institute in Germany – which is about the biggest job any scientist in Germany could ever hope to get.

One morning in 2002, I was sitting in my office and my boss’s boss, Cherry Murray, called me on the phone. This was unusual - she had a lot of responsibilities at the time and she rarely called randomly. She sounded worried “Could you come down to my office right now?”. It sounded pretty serious, but I had no idea what it was about. At the time, Bell Labs was downsizing – maybe there was another cut?

When I arrived in her office, the rest of the management team of the Physical Sciences research lab was sitting around a large table in Cherry’s office. Cherry started the meeting “We have a serious problem.” She then explained that over the last two days, the Schön fraud had come to light. It turned out that his huge body of scientific work was all fiction.

There had certainly been some claims that one or the other of his papers were scientifically questionable for one reason or another. Discussions frequently went along the lines of “this paper doesn’t make sense – probably he is measuring X when he thinks he is measuring Y”. This kind of error in scientific reasoning is common, and given the large number of papers he was publishing, it was not surprising that some of his work did not quite have all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed yet. But these were honest scientific discussions – there are lots of papers that turn out to be wrong in the end that do not constitute fraud.

There had also been one serious internal accusation at Bell that some of his data had been dishonestly manipulated. Schön cooperated with this investigation and was actually exonerated from wrongdoing. Much later it turned out that he was exonerated because he was a very clever liar and managed to come up with a better lie to cover up the first. (No one doubts that he was actually quite brilliant in a fiendish way). But finally, enough data had accumulated that it was clear that he had just been making things up all along.

After Schön’s fraud was discovered, the rest was damage control. A blue ribbon panel was appointed to investigate what happened in great detail (the full report is available online here). Schön was eventually fired and Bell ended up with a bit of a black eye. The truth, however, is that in the 10+ years that I was at Bell, while this was certainly a memorable black eye, it was far from the worst thing that happened to us. In fact, considering all the downsizings, layoffs, and restructuring we went through over those years, the Schön fiasco, while embarrassing, was barely a blip.

Like any newsworthy event, the Schön fiasco certainly generated a lot of opinions. And inevitably, there will be some loudmouths making stupid comments on the subject – some of them in public places like the New York Times (You can google for yourself, I’m not going to embarrass these people by linking to the relevant articles). Since the fiasco, I have also heard a lot of stupid comments from other scientists about the Schön affair. Many of these comments were from people who really did not know much about what actually happened – and some from people who thought they knew what was going on, but really didn’t. I’ve also heard a fair amount of revisionist history around the community. Certain people have also apparently taken great pleasure in saying “this would not have happened if..” , or “we knew all along..”, or “this happened because..”. Which in almost every case, I disagree with. There was also this rather absurd pseudo-documentary by the BBC which tried to connect Schön to grey goo that is going to take over the world.

It is certainly worth asking, as a community, “why did this happen and how do we prevent it from happening again”. But I am certain there is no simple single answer to why - it was a combination of many factors – a perfect storm of conditions that allowed such mistakes to go undetected. The blame lies everywhere - his collaborators, his managers, the journals, the downsizing at Bell, how certain types of experiments are not easily reproduced, how many scientists can be gullible, how the community has a bit of a lemming mentality, how the scientific community depends on trust, and so forth. I am certain that our community could very easily be duped by another Schön. As in that case, eventually fraud would be discovered, but it could take quite some time. In fact, had Schön not been so brazen in his fraud, he could easily have kept it going for many more years before being discovered. Most scientists just don’t want to work in a world where they cannot trust their colleagues, so we assume that most people are not pathological liars, and we accept the fact that once in a long time a Schön will come along and fool everyone – at least for a while.

The reason I am telling this story again is because this month a new book by Eugenie Reich is being released that describes the details of the Schoen fiasco and how it happened. A brief article appears this month in Physics world, which you can find here. I was interviewed by Ms. Reich last year for this book (with the permission of Bell) and I was also quoted in the Physics world article. I hope that this book will be a reasonably accurate and level-headed portrayal of what took place without too much hype and without trying to create villains out of people who were at least trying to be honest. Schön was obviously not being honest, but most of the others were trying.

I intend to order this book from Amazon and I’ll report back what I think (not sure when I will get around to reading it though).

PS: Considering that I was only two doors down from him, I was surprisingly decoupled from most of the events of this story. I was never Schön’s manager, and I had only a few scientific discussions with him. I did assign one unlucky student a summer project about thinking about some of his “puzzling” data, but we never figured much out (and I think she ended up rather frustrated by it – I’m not sure where she is now). I was also involved in the earlier internal investigation that I mentioned above. As with much of my job for those years at Bell mainly I was there to keep the peace and duck when things got too rough.