| Jan Hendrik Schon's success seemed too
good to be true, and it was. In only four years as a physicist at Bell
Laboratories, Schon, 32, had co-anthored 90 scientific papers--one every 16
days--detailing new discoveries in superconductivity, lasers, nanotechnology and
quantum physics. This output astonished his colleagues, and made them
suspicious. When one co-worker noticed that the same table of data appeared in
two separate papers--which also happened to appear in the two separate
papers--which also happened to appear in the two most prestigious scientific
journals in the world, Science and Nature--the jig was up. In October 2002, a
Bell Labs investigation found that Schon had falsified and fabricated data. His
career as a scientist was finished. If it sounds a lot like the fall of Hwang Woo Suk--the South Korean researcher who fabricated his evidence about cloning human cells--it is. Scientific scandals, which are as old as science itself, tend to follow similar patterns of hubris and comeuppance. Afterwards, colleagues wring their hands and wonder how such malfeasance can be avoided in the future. But it never is entirely. Science is built on the honor system; the method of peer-review, in which manuscripts are evaluated by experts in the field, is not meant to catch cheats. In recent years, of course, the pressure on scientists to publish in the top journals has increased, making the journals that much more crucial to career success. The questions raised anew by Hwang's fall are whether Nature and Science reaches the public, and whether the journals are up to their task as gatekeepers. Scientists are also trying to reach other scientists through Science and Nature, not just the public. Being often-cited will increase a scientist's "Impact Factor", a measure of how often papers are cited by peers. Funding agencies use the Impact Factor as a rough measure of the influence of scientists they're considering supporting. It also no doubt reflects the increasing and sometimes excessive emphasis amongst funding agencies and governments on publication measures, such as the typical rates of citation of journals. Whether the clamor to appear in these journals has any bearing on their ability to catch fraud is another matter. The fact is, fraud is terrifically hard to spot. The panel found that Hwang had fabricated all of the evidence for research that claimed to have cloned human cells, but that he had successfully cloned the dog Snuppy. After this, Science sent the paper to three stem-cell experts, who had a week to look it over. Their comments were favorable. How were they to know that the data was fraudulent? With the financial and deadline pressures of the publishing industry, it's unlikely that the journals are going to take markedly stronger measures to vet manuscripts. Beyond replicating the experiments themselves, which would be impractical, it's difficult to see what they could do to take science beyond the honor system. |