Synopses & Reviews
This is the story of wunderkind physicist Jan Hendrik Schön who faked the discovery of a new superconductor made from plastic. A star researcher at the world-renowned Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, he claimed to have stumbled across a powerful method for making carbon-based crystals into transistors, the switches found on computer chips. Had his experiments worked, they would have paved the way for huge advances in technology--computer chips that we could stick on a dress or eyewear, or even use to make electronic screens as thin and easy-to-fold as sheets of paper.
But as other researchers tried to recreate Schön's experiments, the scientific community learned that it had been duped. Why did so many top experts, including Nobel prize-winners, support Schön? What led the major scientific journals to publish his work, and promote it with press releases? And what drove Schön, by all accounts a mild-mannered, modest and obliging young man, to tell such outrageous lies?
Review
"A brilliant study of scientific fraud." Financial Times Book of the Year
Review
"…a wonderful piece of forensic writing." Financial Times
Review
"Plastic Fantastic offers a compelling, timely and well-written dissection of our era's most outrageous scientific fraud, and of what it means for science today." American Scientist Magazine
Review
"Reich's account is meticulously researched, based on interviews with over 120 scientists, friends and editors. It is gripping stuff: a surprising page-turner that is well worth reading." New Scientist
Review
"Reich, a former reporter and editor at New Scientist, has done a remarkable amount of sleuthing. Her account is based on interviews with 125 scientists and journal editors, several of whom also shared unpublished correspondence, e-mails, article drafts and more. She undertook some forensics of her own as well, unearthing a few more instances of Schon's chicanery that had been missed." David Kaiser, American Scientist read the entire )
Synopsis
This is the story of wunderkind physicist Jan Hendrik Schon who faked the discovery of a new superconductor made from plastic. A star researcher at the world-renowned Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, he claimed to have stumbled across a powerful method for making carbon-based crystals into transistors, the switches found on computer chips. Had his experiments worked, they would have paved the way for huge advances in technology — computer chips that we could stick on a dress or eyewear, or even use to make electronic screens as thin and easy-to-fold as sheets of paper.
But as other researchers tried to recreate Schon's experiments, the scientific community learned that it had been duped. Why did so many top experts, including Nobel prize-winners, support Schon? What led the major scientific journals to publish his work, and promote it with press releases? And what drove Schon, by all accounts a mild-mannered, modest and obliging young man, to tell such outrageous lies?
Synopsis
Highly regarded science journalist Eugenie Samuel Reich recounts the case of wunderkind physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, who faked the discovery of a new superconductor at the world famous Bell Laboratories. Many of the worlds top scientific journals and experts, including Nobel Prize-Winners, supported Schön, only to learn that they were the victims of the biggest fraud in science. What drove Schön, by all accounts a mild-mannered, modest, and obliging young man, to tell such outrageous lies? Reich dives into the riveting world of science to examine how fraud perpetuates itself today. Schöns rise and fall will be an essential and fascinating account of the missteps of the scientific community for years to come.
About the Author
Eugenie Samuel Reich is a former editor at New Scientist. She has written for Nature, New Scientist, and The Boston Globe, and is known for her hard hitting reports on irregular science. Several of her reports have resulted in institutional investigations. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Table of Contents
Introduction * Into the Woods * Hendrik * A Slave to Publication * Greater Expectations * Not Ready to be a Product * Journals with “Special Status” * Scientists Astray * Plastic Fantastic * The Nanotechnology Department * The Fraud Taboo * ‘Game Over * Epilogue * Notes and Additional References