Elements 116 and 118 are Bogus?

prostoalex writes "In this era of corporate misbehavior and overstatement of results who can you trust? Scientific sources, of course. Well, turns out people at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory lied about their discovery of elements 116 and 118. Associated Press has the story, quoting the lab officials charging the researchers with "scientific misconduct"."

Just one person

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does the story submitter say "people" and "the researchers" when the AP story clearly states that the fabrication was done by one person?

Well..

[iONiUM]

I just hope there was no research studies which "used" these elements... :)

Trust?

[zebs]

From a quick read of the article it doesn't like there's any big trust issue here...

The scientists rechecked there data and retracted there claims... where's the cover up? Isn't that pretty much normal in the scientific community?

(Ok... maybe they should have check their results before announcing anything, but its not like they denied anything or blatantly lied!)

Re:Is it possible....

[Christopher Thomas]

Is it possible for elements to be "missing" actually. Like gaps in the chart? Do there have to be continuous numbers? Or can you count them ... 114, 115, 117, 119???

The atomic number is just the number of protons in the atom, so you could in principle build all of them without gaps.

However, you can have gaps between stable (or almost-stable) elements, with only very-unstable elements in between. That's the whole idea of the "magic island of stability" mentioned in the articles.

Even-numbered heavy elements also tend to be more stable than odd-numbered elements (as even-numbered nuclei tend to be more energetically favourable, and there's an easy decay path that turns odd nuclei into even ones [beta decay]).

Don't blink

[enigma971]

Maybe someone can educate me. Why should I care that another element existed for an instant? It's been a long time since my last chemistry class so maybe I've forgotten some things. It just doesn't seem like very useful research.

Retracted last July?

[ianscot]

From the retraction in the original publication:

The team of Berkeley Lab scientists that announced two years ago the observation of what appeared to be Element 118 -- heaviest undiscovered transuranic element at the time -- has retracted its original paper after several confirmation experiments failed to reproduce the results.

That was dated July of 2001 if I remember right.

So they said they'd found something, but the confirming experiments didn't come through. They've retracted their claim. That's pretty much how it works. Seems like you can still trust science, precisely because of stories like this. Right?

Re:bad news for science?

[Peter Trepan]

Erm... Maybe I'm daft, but I can't tell if you're kidding here. The strength of science is that it does not require faith. It actually becomes more reliable when faced with scrutiny.

Re:bad news for science?

[dev0n]

I think that this story PROVES the credibility of science.

In June 1999, scientists at Berkeley discovered 2 new elements.

The scientists and other members of the scientific community attempted to reproduce these elements.

They couldn't.

In July 2001, Berkeley's claims were retracted.

So what if it turns out that one scientist or a group of scientists did something wrong? The point here is that they didn't get away with it. The scientific process is WORKING.

IMHO, of course. :)

The Scientific Method and Peer Review Worked

[FreeUser]

"In this era of corporate misbehavior and overstatement of results who can you trust? Scientific sources, of course. Well, turns out people at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory lied about their discovery of elements 116 and 118."

In this particular case, one person lied. Not people, one person, and there was no coverup. Quite the contrary. Despite the fact that some basic check-and-balance procedures were not followed (designed to avoid emberrassment, as there will always be external peer review on this sort of thing as a matter of course), the standard peer review uncovered the fraud when other scientists couldn't duplicate the findings.

At a speech to employees last month, the lab's director, Charles Shank, said the supposedly landmark discovery of elements 118 and 116 was the result of scientific misconduct by one individual of a 15-member team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Lab officials last year retracted the announcement of the discovery after the research team and other scientists were unable to duplicate the results,

[...]

Shank lauded his own department for ferreting out the fraud.

"There is nothing more important for a laboratory than scientific integrity," Shank told lab employees. "Only with such integrity will the public, which funds our work, have confidence in us."

The heavy element research fraud is a stinging embarrassment for the lab. Shank admitted that basic verifications necessary for such lofty scientific proclamations were not followed.

It is all about checks and balances, whether you are talking about science, politics, engineering, or jurisprudence. Take away your checks and balances and things will go awry ... keep them firmly in mind, and firmly in place, and when aberrations like this occur they will be spotted quickly and dealt with.

I only wish more people in our society were aware of this basic and very important fact. It is what allows science to function and progress, and it is what allows our democracy to function despite personal corruption. Anytime anyone suggests a "reform" or change, in policy or procedure, that in some way diminishes the checks and balances that are in place *cough* ceeding unprecendented powers to the FBI *cough*, like not doing "the most elemenary checks and data archiving" suspicions should be raised, significantly.

However, in this case peer review and the usual checks and balances did in fact ferret out the fraud and make it known rather quickly. I think this demonstrates that, while individual scientists are certainly capable of misconduct, the scientific method and peer review regime we have works pretty well, and is quite trustworthy.

Re:Just one person

[caesar-auf-nihil]

The rest of the lab did verify his claims, which is why the scientist who made the discovery was fired.
It takes a VERY LONG TIME to peer-review high energy atomic physics, let alone duplicate the experiment. So just because they didn't catch it when they first read the data DOES NOT MEAN THEY OBVIOUSLY NEGLECTED TO VERIFY HIS CLAIMS.

Data fraud does occur, but it is almost always caught by the peer review process.