Sept. 25, 2002 — An independent investigation into the work of Bell Labs physicist Hendrik Schön has found compelling evidence “that manipulation and misrepresentation of data occurred” in small tech related research.

The incident marks the first case of scientific misconduct in the 77-year history of Bell Laboratories, now a part of Lucent Technologies.

The investigation, which Bell Labs asked Stanford physics professor Malcolm Beasley and four colleagues to begin this spring, concluded that Schön had broken a wide variety of scientific practices, but cleared his co-authors of any wrongdoing.

The investigators’ report, released today, noted that Schön’s research might yet prove to be groundbreaking in small tech areas such as molecular electronics and superconducting materials. But for the work done in connection with 25 papers between 1998 and 2001, the report determined that Schön had not kept proper lab records, deleted some of the raw electronics data associated with the experiments and papers and used the same set of data to represent different materials or devices.

The report found Schön’s substitution of mathematical functions to represent real data particularly egregious. “Such practices are completely unacceptable and represent scientific misconduct,” the investigators said in the report’s executive summary.

Bell Labs said that Schön had been fired.

The appendix of the full 127-page report includes a statement from Schön: “Although I disagree with several of the findings and conclusions in the report … I have to admit that I made various mistakes in my scientific work, which I deeply regret.”

He also insisted that “all the scientific publications I prepared were based on experimental observations” and wrote, “I believe these results will be reproduced in the future and, if possible for me, I am willing to work hard on this task, since reproduction will be the only proof of these scientific effects.”

Beasley said that the investigation was “a large task, and wasn’t fun” but showed that “science still works.” He added that the report’s findings was an opportunity for all organizations, including the scientific journals that published the flawed papers, to look at how they test and challenge scientific results.