Schön scandal

The Schön scandal was a case of academic misconduct and scientific fraud perpetuated by German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön (born August 1970). He briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparently successful experiments with semiconductors that showed revolutionary results, but were discovered later to be fraudulent. Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics and the Braunschweig Prize in 2001, as well as the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002, all of which were later rescinded. He was also supposed to receive the William L. McMillan Award from the University of Illinois in 2002, but due to the intervention of Daniel C. Ralph of Cornell University (who was on the committee of the McMillan Award), Schön was never given the award.

The scandal provoked discussion in the scientific community about the degree of responsibility which coauthors and reviewers of scientific articles bear in cases of scientific misbehavior. The discussion mainly concerned whether peer review, traditionally designed to find errors and determine relevance and originality of articles, should also be required to detect deliberate fraud.

Beginning of fame

Schön's topic of research was condensed matter physics and nanotechnology. He received his PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1997. During late 1997, he was hired by Bell Labs, where he worked on electronics in which conventional semiconducting elements (such as silicon) were replaced by crystalline organic (meaning carbon-based) materials. Schön, however, claimed spectacular ability for changing the conductivity of the organic materials, well beyond anything achieved to date.