Lucent Reexamines Breakthrough Research 139
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.
Before the bashing begins.... (Score:4, Informative)
They have invented, among MANY other things...
"the transistor, the laser and wireless technologies." [bell-labs.com]
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!)
Re:molecule size vs. atomic size (Score:3, Informative)
More info of the fraud (Score:5, Informative)
For the past two years, a team at Bell Labs/Lucent, led by a young physicist named Jan Hendrik Schon [lucent.com], has published a dizzying array of groundbreaking work in the field of solid-state physics, which has previously
inspired discussions at Slashdot,
here [slashdot.org]
and here. [slashdot.org]
However, as reported tonight in Science [sciencemag.org] (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 [blogspot.com]. Scroll down to thursday may 16...
impacting
Here's the text (Score:3, Informative)
Officials at Bell Laboratories, the research arm of Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, New Jersey, are forming a committee of outside researchers to investigate questions about a recent series of acclaimed scientific studies. Outside researchers presented evidence to Bell Labs management last week of possible manipulation of data involving five separate papers published in Science, Nature, and Applied Physics Letters over 2 years.
The papers describe a series of different device experiments, 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.
The groundbreaking papers include Bell Labs physicist Jan Hendrik Schön as lead author and his colleagues at Murray Hill and elsewhere as co-authors. Schön is the only researcher who co-authored all five papers in question. Everyone involved agrees that the questions need further investigation, but many fear that the impact could be devastating for Bell Labs and for solid state physics. Schön told ScienceNOW that he stands behind his data, and he says it's not surprising that experiments with similar devices produce similar-looking data.
Schön, who joined Bell Labs in 1998, has worked most closely with former Bell Labs physicist Bertram Batlogg--now at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich--and Bell Labs chemist Christian Kloc. His work has focused on efforts to make novel types of transistors using organic materials. He was the lead author on at least 17 papers in Science and Nature in the last 2.5 years.
Until this week, many physicists believed the impressive string of results was worthy of consideration for a Nobel Prize, although other groups have reported no success in reproducing Schön's most striking results. Last week, several physicists began to present their doubts to company managers. Bell Labs spokesperson Saswato Das says that company officials take the concerns "very seriously." Within hours of hearing of them on 10 May, Das says that Lucent management decided to form an external review panel chaired by Stanford University physicist Malcolm Beasley. Das says, "The panel will be given full freedom to make an independent review of concerns that have been raised." Physicist Paul McEuen of Cornell University, one of the first to question the data openly, says that Lucent is taking the right step: "Malcolm Beasley has great stature in the community. ... Everybody wants to get to the truth."
--ROBERT F. SERVICE
Figure legend: Striking resemblance. Bell Labs is investigating a possible duplication of data in several publications. (* The author has corrected the bottom graph.)
Re:Before the bashing begins.... (Score:3, Informative)
They were buying companies left and right and increasing thier already huge debt burdon. And then failing to utilize many of the technologies they bought.
Once upon a time Bell Labs was the leader in numerous fields, largely because they invented them. Now they're in second place or worse in virtually every field. They'll occasionally come out with something innovative and then someone else will do the same thing without violating their patent, for less, and with a better business plan.
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!)
I'd also put that in the past tense.
Lucent is rapidly becoming the Xerox PARC of the 1990s/2000s - lots of nifty stuff which proceeds to rot or be taken by other companies.