BOOK REVIEW
Physics and Pixie Dust
David Kaiser
PLASTIC FANTASTIC: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World. Eugenie Samuel Reich. iv + 266 pp. Palgr
$26.95.
For many years, historians of the Renaissance have lauded the value of forgeries and fakes. Counterfeit documents, passed off a
clues about the wider culture in which they were made. They illuminate subtle, taken-for-granted assumptions and habits of the
must have had particular ideas in mind about what counted as genuine when crafting their fakes. Anthony Grafton, the distinguis
has gone even further. In his 1990 book, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship, Grafton argues that
recognize as scholarship in the humanities today—entire fields such as literary criticism, jurisprudence, the history of ideas, relig
matured thanks to a constant back-and-forth engagement with frauds and forgeries. Those fields took form by honing esoteric te
scrutinizing documents and works of art, perpetually improving clever ways to sort authentic wheat from forged chaff. A kind of a
methods for detecting forgeries improved, forgers grew more sophisticated in designing fakes, and so on down through the ages.
What could that possibly have to do with modern science? A great deal more than we might suspect. Just in the past few years,
been rocked by a series of high-profile frauds. Within the physical sciences, accusations arose in 2002 of data rigging in a search
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The curious story of Igor and Grichka Bogdanov broke that same year: Twin theoretical p
France, they were widely suspected of having succeeded in getting nonsense articles through peer review at major physics journa
biologists’ turn. Late in 2005, South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-Suk was accused of having fabricated the data on which at le
in Science about stem cells and cloning were based. A few weeks earlier an MIT associate professor of biology, Luk Van Parijs, h
fabricating and falsifying data in a paper published in Nature Genetics as well as in unpublished manuscripts and on grant applic
But one fraud outstripped them all, eclipsing the others with its sheer audacity. Between 2000 and 2002, Jan Hendrik Schön, a re
Laboratories, published more than 20 articles on electrical properties of unusual materials. He shot to the very top of the boomin
electronics”—a wonder field in which researchers aim to shrink computer chips down to single-molecule components. At Schön’s p
4 or 5 articles per month, most of them going to top journals like Science and Nature. He hit his record in autumn 2001, turning
November alone. The output was staggering. It’s rare for a scientist—even a string theorist, beholden neither to instruments nor
articles in an entire year, let alone one month. And Schön’s papers were no run-of-the-mill exercises. In them, he announced one
after another: He had created organic plastics that became superconductors or lasers; he had fashioned nanoscale transistors; a
Science hailed one of his many contributions as a “breakthrough of the year” in 2001. The CEO of Lucent Technologies (parent co
likewise touted Schön’s work when courting investors. Everything Schön touched seemed to turn to research gold.
Alas, it was fool’s gold. Following a formal investigation in 2002, Bell Labs dismissed Schön. The investigating committee, chaire
Malcolm Beasley, considered serious allegations against 24 papers by Schön and his coauthors, including 8 published in Science a
committee concluded that at least 16 of the papers showed clear evidence of scientific misconduct. Another 6 struck the committ
if they were not indisputably the result of intentional fraud.
According to the Beasley committee, Schön’s misconduct fell into three basic categories: “substitution of data,” “unrealistic preci
“results that contradict known physics.” The “substitution” charge was that Schön recycled graphs representing data from one typ
axes or labels, and passed them off as coming from different materials. The second two charges involved either heavy-handed m
such as replacing raw data with averaged, filtered or smoothed curves—or the fabrication of entire data sets out of thin air. Some
articles, for example, appeared to have been generated by matching a known equation, with no experimental input whatsoever.
Eugenie Samuel Reich has written an impressive, sobering book about Schön’s rapid rise and precipitous fall. One might have exp
face a serious narrative challenge: Just as in the movie Titanic, we all know how the story will end. In Reich’s case, the culprit h
is the mystery? Reich turns this challenge into an asset. This is not a simple whodunit. Like historians of the Renaissance, Reich
important point to make. She skillfully leverages the Schön case into a wider inquiry into the mores of modern science.
The analogies with Grafton’s work on Renaissance forgeries are remarkable: not just the prevalence of fraud in each domain, but
forgers crafted their fakes, and the feedback loops connecting forgers and other researchers. Schön, like his forging forebears, wo
idea of what real or legitimate knowledge claims should look like. He sought to make his fakes fit in rather than stand out, mass
match established predictions. The detail with which he gilded his fakes—put in to confer a sense of realism—began to trip him u
forgeries of yore. The first serious inquiry into Schön’s work arose when a fellow specialist noticed that some of Schön’s data fit t
too well. Theory suggested that a certain relationship between two parameters should follow a bell-shaped curve on average. Sc
bell-shaped curve, with none of the noise or jitter that usually marks authentic experimental data.
Schön’s work, like that of long-ago forgers, also had a convoluted provenance. As Grafton explains, literary forgers often found it
elaborate story about why the original document they claimed to have discovered was no longer available for others’ inspection.
these ancient papyri in my fields, but they crumbled to dust just after I managed to transcribe them.”) So, too, with Schön. He co
his experiments at his former laboratory in Germany, where he had completed his doctorate, rather than on site at Bell Labs. Wh
occasionally expressed curiosity about how he prepared his samples or undertook his measurements, Schön could throw up his ha
the apparatus was several thousand miles away. Schön also maintained that he was in the habit of deleting all computer files of
claimed that his computers lacked adequate storage space to keep the original data files—saving instead only the results after d
various layers of analysis.
Most interesting is that Schön’s frauds actually benefited from rigorous peer review at elite journals, much as earlier forgers bene
advanced techniques of text-obsessed humanists. The critiques and suggestions that Schön received in referee reports told him e
take to convince skeptics about new findings. If his amazing plastics really did show evidence of superconductivity, reviewers pre
checked for such and such effects or measured this or that parameter? Schön could then deliver those results right back, in perfe
expectations.
Reich expands her story beyond the minutiae of how Schön crafted his fakes. The official inquiry, chaired by Beasley, exonerated
and colleagues of any wrongdoing. Some of Schön’s former managers even won awards for their handling of the allegations. Yet
the “one bad apple” account, and she makes a compelling argument.
As Reich documents, managers at Bell Labs repeatedly turned a blind eye toward early warnings that all might not be right with
managers might not have been guilty of fraud, but they certainly committed serious crimes against common sense. No one writes
month—that’s about one new article every four days. Ordinarily, a topflight researcher might publish a dozen or so articles in Scie
the course of his or her entire career, not during one summer. Schön’s managers were all too eager—desperate, one suspects—to
and fairies.
Those managers had reasons to welcome Schön’s alluring offerings. The dot-com stock bubble had burst, sending the finances of
The laboratory began to hemorrhage researchers; its Physical Research Laboratory lost half its staff between 1997 (the year befo
postdoc) and 2001. A wave of corporate restructuring brought in more middle managers with less lab-bench experience. The fastcharts led to a management vacuum: Over the course of just a few months in 2001, Schön answered to three different managers
managers, in turn, were all too happy to see their star researcher churn out stupendous results at very low cost. They began to t
to stop asking for expensive equipment and act more like Schön.
Nor were the managers at Bell Labs alone in wishing upon a star. Reich hunted down correspondence between editors and review
Schön’s article submissions. She discovered a pattern of solicitous editors—both Nature and Science were eager at just that time
publications in areas such as materials science and nanotechnology, so as to counter the journals’ heavy concentration on biome
often fast-tracked Schön’s articles, sending them out for fewer rounds of peer review than usual. Schön’s papers in Science, for e
print more than 25 percent faster than the journal’s average. Reich found evidence that on at least one occasion, editors at Scien
written policy and accepted a paper by Schön on the basis of only a single referee report.
The excesses of the Schön case—like the fantastic forgeries of previous eras—throw light onto habits and practices that have com
relentless rat race to produce new results quickly in order to secure the next round of funding or promotion is not without conseq
relationship between prestigious scientific journals like Science and Nature and journalists—who receive prepublication copies of
special embargo, allowing them to prepare accompanying news coverage—entangles scientists, laboratories’ press relations staff
investors and others in dizzying webs of potential conflicts of interest. Schön clearly broke the rules. But the rules, Reich sugges
look, too.
Reich, a former reporter and editor at New Scientist, has done a remarkable amount of sleuthing. Her account is based on intervi
and journal editors, several of whom also shared unpublished correspondence, e-mails, article drafts and more. She undertook so
as well, unearthing a few more instances of Schön’s chicanery that had been missed.
The one shortcoming of the book is that most of Reich’s impressive legwork is inadequately reflected in the endnotes. The notes
published materials, which make up only a small portion of the wide-ranging materials on which the account is based. For a book
reconstructs Schön’s failure to properly handle and document his data, the lightweight endnote apparatus comes as something of
Otherwise, Reich’s Plastic Fantastic offers a compelling, timely and well-written dissection of our era’s most outrageous scientific
means for science today.
David Kaiser is an associate professor in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and a lecturer in MIT’s Department
book, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005), received the 2007 Pfizer Award fro
Science Society for best book in the field. He is currently completing a book titled How the Hippies Saved Physics.
You can find this online at http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/physics-and-pixie-dust
© Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society