Between 1997 and 2002, Jan Hendrik Schön, a young German physicist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, stunned the sedate field of advanced microelectronics with a series of ground-breaking scientific papers. Schön had mastered the art of making electronic devices not from the conventional silicon but from crystals of organic (carbon- based) materials, and he coaxed from them all manner of exotic behaviour, producing lasers, superconductors and strange quantum-mechanical effects.

In Schön’s hands, every experiment bore glorious fruit. No sooner would his colleagues speculate about new possibilities than he would conjure them forth. He was the golden boy of Bell Labs, where the transistor had been invented at the dawn of the electronic age. Top journals competed to publish his papers, Nobel prizewinners sang his praises, and there were whispers that Schön’s own Nobel might not be long in coming. Then, seemingly overnight, the shocking truth emerged: Schön had been making it all up. The devices mostly never existed at all. For five years he had pulled off the biggest scam in modern physics, and in Plastic Fantastic the science journalist Eugenie Samuel Reich unpicks the tale with meticulous care.

There’s nothing new about scientific fraud. Alchemists and physicians were at it in antiquity, and the inventor Charles Babbage claimed in 1830 that it was eroding English science. But it has recently become a growth industry, by which I mean not that there is necessarily more of it but that there is an expanding machinery for finding and dealing with it, along with greater unease among scientists about its scope and effects. In the most notorious recent incident, the South Korean stem-cell rese­archer Hwang Woo-suk went from celebrity to outcast after he was found to have manipulated data and flouted ethical rules.

The widespread view of the Schön affair among physicists is that these things are almost impossible to prevent if the perpetrator is wily enough, and that the eventual detection of fraud demonstrates the self-correcting robustness of the scientific process: others will try and fail to reproduce the results. I shared that view until I read this book, in which Reich argues that they hide a dangerous complacency.

Scientific fraud typically involves tampering with data: when your experiments don’t quite work out, you alter the results to say what you want. Schön’s case wasn’t like this. It seems likely that his dazzling results were constructed purely on the computer, without any experimentation at all. The truth emerged almost by accident, when someone noticed that graphs from allegedly different experiments looked identical. Suspicions having already been raised by subtle inconsistencies in the data, it then took only a little detective work to discover too many other instances of duplication for Schön to pass them off as simple mistakes. When Bell Labs began an overdue investigation, the whole deceit unravelled.

Yet how did Schön get away with it for so long? In frequent trips back to his old lab at the University of Konstanz, he claimed to put the crucial finishing touches to his devices. He’d head off with raw material from his hapless collaborators, and return with beautifully smooth graphs showing a galaxy of exciting electronic properties artfully balanced between the plausible and the remarkable. Yet as the plaudits and press releases piled up, none of his managers at Bell insisted on seeing a working experiment, or even the devices themselves. When other colleagues did, he’d smile and say he’d forgotten to bring them back.

Reich doesn’t quite manage to convey what was at stake in the science, this being rather recondite physics of a kind that rarely makes headlines; even Schön and his Bell associates acknowledged that app­lications in information technology were remote. But what holds the attention is the strangeness of Schön himself. Defying the arrogant and pugnacious stereotype of the maverick, he was mild and modest, agreeing with everything that was put to him and giving his colleagues and supervisors just what they hoped to see. That was after all his modus operandi.

Rather than being sheer guile, however, it seems to have stemmed from a distorted eagerness to please. Schön is a bland void at the heart of this story. He wasn’t oblivious to fame and praise, but neither did he seek to profit or bask in his glory. Prepared to expose mentors, family and collaborators to eventual ridicule and worse while exhibiting no obvious malice or greed, he seems genuinely, tragically sociopathic, and neither Reich nor anyone else has quite plumbed his character.

Reich’s thorough analysis is only slightly let down in the epilogue, which warns unconvincingly that Schön might one day be at liberty to do it again. Misconduct of this order is a lifelong stigma. And Reich’s doubts about the inadequacies of science’s self-correction seem to hinge on the circular notion that it would never have happened without those who did the correcting. Yet she has uncovered enough complacency, bad management and gullibility to give all scientists pause.

Plastic Fantastic by Eugenie Samuel Reich
Palgrave Macmillan £15.99 pp272

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