Lucent Reexamines Breakthrough Research

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.

Fake results

[brejc8]

It makes me sad when I see companys trying to hype up their research to pump up their share price.

Now when my group does any research which has positive results we are scared to release anything because everyone assumes its simply another con.

Currently we have an asynchronous processor which releases so little EMI it looks dead in the graphs.

We tried showing this to other people but everyone nowdays refuses to beleve anything unconvesional can be good.

Re:Fake results

[Alsee]

asynchronous processor which releases so little EMI it looks dead in the graphs.

Sounds like an obvious result to me. Asynchronous means the transistors don't fire at the same time, and they don't fire at a consistant frequency.

Listening to EMI from a normal CPU is like listening to someone pour 100 pounds of bricks.
Listening to an asynchronous processor is like listening to someone pour 100 pounds of talcum powder. You just get a low whoosh noise.

-

Value of research.

[Restil]

From what I can tell, this should mostly be an in-house issue. Let's say that these discoveries are frauds. That means they won't ever be used in applications, and Lucent will lose out. If no other scientists are able to replicate the process, then they won't be able to reap the benefits of it either. There is a REASON for this peer review. And it seems to be working. There are many possible reasons why things are turning out like they are, fraud being one of them.

However, its possible that the procedures involved are not trivial. Its also possible that either the procedures involved to produce or the procedures involved to confirm the findings are in error. Observing a single molecule is NOT trivial. It's certainly possible to think you've got what you were looking for, when in fact it sometimes takes another pair of unbiased eyes to take a different approach and discover that all is not what it appears to be.

I'm not saying this isn't outright fraud. The only problem is, what does it benefit anyone? If the scientist involved was pocketing all the research cash and running with it, I could understand. But if the research is legitimate, and nobody is able to actually profit from any of this without a working prototype in a useful medium, which may take up to 10 more years to produce, fraud would serve little purpose except give a black eye to the researchers AND Lucent.

-Restil

that's how science works nowadays

[dario_moreno]

Look at the space occupied by the Physical Review on the shelves of a library : went from less than 1 meter a year in the 1950's to maybe 20 meters nowadays...and the number of quality scientists has not increased 20fold ! At this time, it was enough to publish a paper once in a while, when a real discovery was made. When looking at the summary of a scientific journal of, say, the 30's, you see Fermi, Einstein, Brillouin, when nowadays articles are just a proof that someone did some work with the money he was given.

The review process has become a joke : either the paper goes to an indirect friend thanks to the editor (submit wisely !), and there is no actual review, or it goes to a concurrent, which makes irrelevant points (in one occurrence I know of, delaying the publication by more than a year making stupid points, and when all the objections were met, asking to change the units, and pointing minor misprints !). The referees usually do not understand the scope or actual point made in a paper, and make the stupidest comments possible (so one of my former bosses recommended to write papers in one afternoon, since the real mistakes would not be spotted anyways). This is also natural because they tend to be flooded by cut-and-paste papers from scientists who are in science only because there is some (ridicully small) money or career to be made, and they could not find a "real" job elsewhere. This is sadly true of the 3rd world, where scientists are underpaid (150$ a month anyone ?) and eagerly look for positions in developed countries, so need published papers, but their lack of money and bad education mean that they often submit utterly uninteresting papers.

This is also true from people under pressure from their supervisors because they are all on short-term contracts, so that they often resort to faking data to get the expected effect. A nice positive result created with the Gimp
(or vi data | gnuplot ) is way nicer than a boring negative result and easier to publish,
even if faked and wrong.

Sometimes the referees even resort to say "
please cite this guy", meaning, "hi, it's me,
hope you do not forget me when I need something or you refer my papers".