Scientific credit and credibility.

T hose of us who have monitored,and participated in, the rapid advances in nanoscale materials in recent years are well aware of the exciting science and technological promise they hold. In the past three years, the extraordinary results from the Bell Labs research facility in Murray Hill,New Jersey,on field-effectinduced phenomena at the molecular scale seemed to epitomize the vision proclaimed by Richard Feynman that “there’s plenty of room at the bottom”. But a certain uneasiness started to emerge as many groups worldwide,all capable in terms of experience and equipment,consistently failed to reproduce many of the results reported by Jan Hendrik Schön and his principal collaborators at Murray Hill,Bertram Batlogg (now at ETH,Zürich) and Christian Kloc.Very early on there was grumbling about the required magnitude of the gate-dielectric breakdown strength of the aluminium oxide layer they used,which some estimated would have to be an order of magnitude above bulk in order to induce the carrier concentration necessary for superconductivity to occur. The credibility dam burst this spring when several researchers attempting field-effect measurements according to the Bell Labs recipe noticed peculiar consistencies (and inconsistencies) in the graphical data published in a number of papers on different materials and sample configurations (see Fig.1).These workers filed a complaint with Lucent management who quickly responded by forming an independent “investigation commission”chaired by Malcolm Beasley of Stanford University. On 25 September 2002, the Beasley Commission issued its report on “the possibility of scientific misconduct in the work of Hendrik Schön and coauthors”,which found Schön guilty of misconduct on the basis of compelling evidence of data fabrication, unjustified manipulation and purposeful misrepresentation.This report, in my opinion, establishes a paradigm of thoroughness and fairness to be followed in such unfortunate cases.The committee cleared Schön’s co-authors of misconduct,but left open the question of professional responsibility on the part of