Here's an article that's just a little heads-up to those who think that falsifying, fabricating, or fudging data is something you can expect to get away with in science:
quote:
German Researcher Stripped of Doctoral
By PANOS KAKAVIATOS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) - A German university said Friday it has revoked the doctoral title of a former star researcher accused of faking data while working at a renowned U.S. electronics lab.
Jan Hendrik Schoen, once considered a potential Nobel prize candidate, caused "the biggest data fabrication scandal in physics in the last 50 years," University of Constance professor Wolfgang Dieterich said in announcing the decision.
Schoen, now 34, was fired by Bell Laboratories in New Jersey in September 2002 after an outside review committee concluded that he made up or altered data 16 times while working in the hot fields of superconductivity and molecular electronics.
Findings he helped research were published in prominent journals such as Science, Nature and Applied Physics Letters.
A committee of 12 professors at his alma mater in southern Germany decided after its own review to strip Schoen of the doctorate in physics he earned in 1998 and asked him to return his diploma, Dieterich said. Schoen has a month to appeal.
Schoen was highly regarded as a young researcher of physics at Constance before going to Bell Labs - the storied place where the transistor was invented in 1947.
"Several colleagues had spoken about him as a possible Nobel Prize candidate," recalled Dieterich. "But by about early 2002, some of his spectacular results had come into question."
It was the first case of scientific fraud in the 77-year history of the Nobel Prize-winning laboratory, according to Bell Labs' parent company, Lucent Technologies.
Schoen insisted in 2002 that "all the scientific publications that I prepared were based on experimental observations," and he expressed confidence that the results will be reproduced by other scientists.
He acknowledged making "various mistakes in my scientific work, which I deeply regret." But he said some were due to the complexity of the work or the result of errors he did not notice before publication.
Dieterich pointed out two examples of data that, if true, would have indeed been spectacular: claims of making electronic devices from organic materials and superconductivity at high temperatures in carbon-based materials.
"We decided to remove his doctorate credentials after our commission checked on the conclusions drawn by the external commission in the United States, and noted that several scientific journals had also retracted some of his published work," Dieterich added.
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Just a moment...
In a scientific community that will literally bust your ass for tainted research, there's just no room for the sort of shenanigans creationists would have us believe occur in the biological sciences.