Washington

One of nanotechnology's rising stars is under investigation following claims that data in some of his papers have been falsified.

Jan Hendrik Schön, a researcher at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, faces an independent inquiry after scientists noticed striking similarities between different graphs in a number of his published papers.

Schön denies the allegations, but if they are upheld, many researchers are worried about the damage that could be done to basic research activities at Bell Labs, perhaps the world's best-known industrial laboratory. In addition, some fear that the allegations will taint nanotechnology's hot reputation.

The incessant drive towards miniaturization in electronics is a major theme of Schön's research. In particular, his work on using organic molecules deposited in thin films as molecular switches is viewed by many as a possible way to beat the size constraints imposed by silicon-based technologies.

Double vision: similar graphs in Science (top) and Nature led some researchers to question the data. Credit: SCIENCE

The allegations against Schön first surfaced late last month after Lydia Sohn, who works on nanoscale electronics at Princeton University in New Jersey, received a tip-off from colleagues at Bell Labs. Sohn compared the graphs that make up Figure 4 in two separate papers published in Science1 and Nature2, and found the plots to be identical, right down to the random noise generated by the experiments (see right).

Sohn notified the journals of the duplication, and they in turn requested that Schön provide clarification. He said that he had mistakenly sent the wrong figure to one of the journals and offered to write a correction.

Echoes from the past

That might have been the end of the matter had not one of Sohn's colleagues, Paul McEuen of Cornell University in New York state, made an unsettling discovery. “I was just looking at some of Schön's old papers and noticed a third similar figure,” says McEuen. This graph was in a Science paper on a different type of microelectronic device3. The data were not identical to the first two, but portions of the graph matched perfectly.

A more extensive search by Sohn, McEuen and others turned up a total of eight figures in six papers that appear to contain suspect data, the researchers say. In one case, two graphs look identical except for inverted scales, says Charles Lieber, a chemist at Harvard University. Lieber has examined all six of the papers under investigation, which include two others in Science4,5 and one in Applied Physics Letters6.

Senior officials at Bell Labs wrote to all the journals involved on 16 May saying that they had convened a special review committee, chaired by physicist Malcolm Beasley of Stanford University in California, to investigate the suspect figures. The investigation comes at a bad time for Bell Labs, as the financial difficulties of its parent company, telecommunications firm Lucent Technologies, have put pressure on the labs' research activities.

“We take concerns of scientific honour very seriously,” says Cherry Murray, Bell Labs' senior vice-president of physical-sciences research, adding that Schön will be allowed to continue his work at Murray Hill until the review is completed. “We certainly don't want to rush to judgement,” she says. Beasley hopes to complete the review by the end of the summer.

Nature will await the panel's findings before considering whether the authors should be asked to modify or retract the papers, says its editor, Philip Campbell.

Rising star: Jan Hendrik Schön's impressive results have secured him several awards. Credit: LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES

Schön stands by his results. “I am confident in the measurements that I have taken and the experimental results, and I've tried to report them as best as I could,” he says. Although he declines to comment on specific allegations, Schön says that he is cooperating fully with the review committee. “I'm collaborating with my colleagues to reproduce these results and show them to the committee,” he says. “I am trying to focus on the science.”

At 31 years old, Schön is seen as one of the most able young physicists in nanotechnology. In the six years since he got his PhD at the University of Konstanz in Germany, he has produced over 100 papers and claimed several patents, as well as winning awards for his work in both the United States and Germany.

The speed and scope of his findings have aroused admiration among researchers — but some of his results have proved hard to reproduce. Robert Dynes at the University of California, San Diego, for example, has tried to replicate some of Schön's results for molecular switches that are turned on and off when an electric field is applied.

“I was fascinated by the results and frustrated that I couldn't reproduce them, and I didn't totally understand why I couldn't,” recalls Dynes. The problem, he says, was that the applied electric field kept destroying critical components of the experiment.

Dynes is not alone. Groups at the French Atomic Energy Commission, Harvard University, Princeton and elsewhere say that they have so far been unable to reproduce some of Schön's results.