Scientist tipped for Nobel prize sacked for fiddling the figures

Some scientists thought Jan Hendrik Schön was headed for the Nobel physics prize. Among the scores of papers he published in just three years, in a field where only a handful annually count as productive, was one saying that he had created a single-molecule transistor. It would allow computers to shrink by factors of many thousands, and revolutionise our world.

But now the 32-year-old German-born former re-searcher at Bell Laboratories in New York is discredited, his work effectively worthless. He was accused of the highest crime in the scientific world: of faking and manipulating his data. Unable to mount a credible defence, Dr Schön was fired for scientific misconduct on Thursday by the telecoms company Lucent, owner of Bell Labs, after a four-month investigation. It was the first such firing in Bell's 77 years.

The clue that first gave him away: Two different papers, Nature and Science, had an identical graph, but were meant to be "about different materials under different conditions", said Carl Ziemelis, physical sciences editor at Nature in London. "And it wasn't a re-statement of data from the other paper." The graphs were identical, down to the tiniest data point. Dr Schön insisted he had simply made an error writing the paper, and sent Science a revised graph.

But in April this year someone inside Bell Labs contacted Lydia Sohn, a Princeton physics professor and suggested something was wrong with Dr Schön's data. With Professor Paul McEuen of Cornell University, she discovered what she called "the smoking gun".

The remorseless investigation uncovered multiple examples among Dr Schön's 90-odd published papers where the graphs were the same, yet purported to show different events. And when they quizzed Dr Schön to show them the original data, he said he had failed to keep it.

The entire edifice began to crumble until it finally toppled yesterday with the formal request by the scientific journals which published Schön's papers, including Nature and Science, for the works' retraction; in effect, an admission that they were not, and could never be, true. That has cast a shadow over Bell Labs, which gave the world the transistor, the laser and the Unix computer operating system, as well as dozens of other inventions down the years, but is now struggling to justify its huge budgets at a time when its parent, Lucent, is laying off thousands of staff.

Dr Schön had seemed like one of those rare geniuses that science occasionally produces. MIT's Technology Review of 2002 picked him as one of 100 technologists under 35 "whose work and ideas will change the world". "I saw [some of his] results being presented to a German audience," said one professor. "They knock on chairs there instead of clapping. And he got a standing knocking." Now, it's completely different. Even the secretary at Cambridge University's optoelectronic department, which Schön never even visited and whose team he never worked with, has heard of the report and reacts to his name as though it were a bad smell.

Dr Neil Greenham, lecturer in physics there, said: "There had been murmurs. People had been trying to reproduce his results, but none had. Even Bell was telling us that it was having problems, that it needed one particular rig to get the results."

Dr Schön, who has been uncontactable this week, has insisted that he did not fake anything. In an appendix to the 127 page report published by Lucent, he said: "I have to admit that I made various mistakes in my scientific work, which I deeply regret. However, I would like to state that all the scientific publications that I prepared were based on experimental observations. I believe that these results will be reproduced in the future."

Some have queried the role of Prof Bernard Batlogg, who recruited Dr Schön to Bell in 1998 and was his supervisor, although he subsequently left to take a job in Switzerland. Earlier this year, when quizzed about his role, he simply said: "If I'm a passenger in a car that drives through a red light, it's not my fault." He told the Lucent committee that he had asked probing questions when the remarkable results had appeared, and received answer that "appeared at that time reasonable and satisfactory". The committee accepted it, and cleared all Schön's co-authors of complicity.

Nobody is sure whether Schön was a foolish innocent, or a culpable deceiver. But his career is surely over: "I would be surprised if he were to be hired in any scientific endeavour," said Dr Greenham yesterday. The search for the molecular transistor will go on, but without the man who claimed to have found it.