Details of what the University of Rochester investigation found are not available.
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Report: Superconductivity researcher found to have committed misconduct
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Sending this article to my daughter who is working on her PhD going to be reminding her that students have a voice...
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At least the grad students stuck to their principles ...
Sad if we can't trust even Nature.
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Kudos for the wordplay in the title! 
Beth Mole is the master at it and this is spot on
Beth Mole is the master at it and this is spot on
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While I'm always skeptical of room-temperature superconductor claims, I'm pretty sure it's not an exception to the laws of physics as we know it.
It's similar to how when super conductors were first discovered it seemed implausible but it turns out they're perfectly possible!
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I expect they have been revealed to him, and if he diagrees he can take the Uni to court (thereby having the allegations made public).
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Yeah, I think that it's a bit akin to cold fusion in this respect: extremely implausible but not strictly speaking impossible.
Put another way: it is a dream that I think is totally worth spending a lot of venture capital chasing after, since it is not like they were doing anything actually useful with that money anyway...
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I feel bad for the students. Their association with this professor will likely work against them even if they weren't complicit (which I doubt they are).
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We could never trust Nature. I would joke that a there's a 50% and chance any paper in Nature was wrong.
I think I may have underestimated that chance.
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The glamour journals do publish a fair share of junk. Sadly the university administrators and search committees prefer Science and Nature over PNAS.
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i do wish they had gone with "Supermisconduct"Kudos for the wordplay in the title!
Beth Mole is the master at it and this is spot on
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There's the possibility of even more shenanigans than the pink stuff. The university where he got his PhD is also investigating his actual thesis ... IIRC, somebody found copy-pasted text in his thesis from previous work, and other discrepancies.
For an academic researcher, falsifying research is a cardinal sin. Research communication is the currency of the profession, and he made counterfeit currency. It's nearly the same context as a banker embezzling. Scientists have a hard enough job without falsified research. He'll never be trusted again to gain grant money, and no grad student will touch him with a 10-foot pole. Even private money will consider him a huge risk.
He might find a job as an adjunct teaching professor, or maybe an industrial lab as a junior lab-rat... maybe... but every bit of data he collects would be scrutinized for years.
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i always wonder what the endgame for people like this is.
like a) if you're promising an earth shattering, commercializable breakthrough, it will be scrutinized. do you honestly think that your forged data will withstand scrutiny and recreation attempts? if you don't think your forgery will stay up, what on earth is your exit strategy? and b) lordy the grad student co-authors of your paper know that you bought the material, and they know what the data actually is. what on earth did you think was going to happen when you lie so blatantly??
like a) if you're promising an earth shattering, commercializable breakthrough, it will be scrutinized. do you honestly think that your forged data will withstand scrutiny and recreation attempts? if you don't think your forgery will stay up, what on earth is your exit strategy? and b) lordy the grad student co-authors of your paper know that you bought the material, and they know what the data actually is. what on earth did you think was going to happen when you lie so blatantly??
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The lack of a full reveal is doing the man a favor, not a disservice. If he really wants to have a public fight over the results of the investigation, no one is stopping him from telling his side of the story to the public. Considering the details we do have, I suspect that the details are even more humiliating than what we have.
The whole incident is an embarrassment, from beginning to end, for all parties involved.
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Nature and Science both have an annoying tendency towards what could be called peer-reviewed-clickbait articles. Yes, there's a lot of good impactful work published in both journals, but it's very important to remember that they do sometimes publish things against the advice of the peer reviewers because the editor thinks the reviews are sufficiently ambiguous and the results sufficiently flashy. And sometimes, like in this case, they get bit hard as a result.
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I suspect in cases like this they have the faith that there IS something there, and fudge the numbers to show what they think the reality is.
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His academic career in the US (and Europe) is almost certainly over, but doubtless there are other institutions around the world willing to hire him.
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PNAS has a nice system that helps reduce (though not eliminate) the junk: The editor making the go/no-go decision after referee reports is an actual working scientist, a member of the NAS (of which the journal is the Proceedings). That means that while they're probably not a specialist in the exact area of a given paper, their areas of expertise are close enough that they can make much more informed decisions than the professional editors at Nature and Science. The latter usually have PhDs in their areas of coverage, but aren't active researchers, so their domain knowledge is more second-hand.
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DeschutesCore
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I get it. I've passed up hiring people because their previous employers couldn't mention why someone was let go and I've been unable to tell people why we fired the last two chuckleschmucks due to privacy laws, but sometimes you have to accept that we are not entitled to every bit of information about people's lives.
How would you feel if a reporter wanted to know why YOU were fired from a job? Suddenly when it's us it becomes "What fucking business is it of yours?".
It's a hard line to walk some days.
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I expect they've convinced themselves that their results actually prove things. Those things they fudged where just minor issues to make the paper look better and of no material consequence. They just need a bit more time and a bit more money to get the fully working device out of the door. Any time now it will definitely work this time...
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I was wondering if it should be Stone Cold Supermisconduction, or the even rarer Room Temperature Misconduction.
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PNAS has/had its own share of problems. It's known for bias against non-academy members.
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There's definitely news/notoriety/financial pressure on Nature & Science editors. I mean, you don't want to be known as the editor that rejected a paper that turned the tables on current science and broke open a whole new field of study.
They have to constantly check their distrust of conflicting data, simply because real breakthroughs have happened before. And data is often messy (it's rarely a perfect, beautiful graph)
So it's a tough balance. And they know science will win out in the end, as other scientists try to repeat that results.
But the fewer of these disasters on your publications resume—or should I say CV—the better.
They have to constantly check their distrust of conflicting data, simply because real breakthroughs have happened before. And data is often messy (it's rarely a perfect, beautiful graph)
So it's a tough balance. And they know science will win out in the end, as other scientists try to repeat that results.
But the fewer of these disasters on your publications resume—or should I say CV—the better.
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Very common amongst tech startups, too. "Sure we aren't profitable yet but we will be, it's totally okay to lie to employees and investors because by the time it's a problem, we'll have succeeded!"
I've personally been burned by an incompetent tech startup that lied to its employees about the valuation because the real value was dirt but they kept hoping they'd "fix" things before it became a "real problem."
It's just like kids spinning elaborate lies to get out of trouble, it always builds up and they can't get out of it. And they're incapable of seeing that parallel, too. They don't view it as a sign of "I'm fucking clueless and need to stop" they view it as "boldly embracing a challenge."
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Not as long as they can show it is the truth, no. Only reason they didn't release it yet is likely because it's customary not to publicize details of employee discipline.
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I, and probably several of us here, have been in the position of having someone ask about a recently discharged coworker's suitability for a new job and having to answer, "Well, the lawyers told me..."
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Feels like it was just the other day when I was saying that “publish or perish” creates perverse incentives for academics to fudge their research.
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I take my hat off to those grad students. They showed some serious academic integrity in face of an extreme power imbalance. If anyone is in a position to do so, give them a job!
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I've got a cheque for $13.56 pinned to my home office wall.
Its the post-bankruptcy discharge payout for the substantial (don't ask how much, just don't) amount that i foolishly put into a startup that I was working at before I really realized how bad things were.
Its a useful reminder of 'fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me'
Seems oddly appropriate in this academic misconduct situation too: because you know full well that despite this, somewhere, the guy will get another job in this area.
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Yeah I was hoping some commenter would give insight into how often this sort of thing happened before Publish or Perish, vs nowadays.
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My more cynical take is that they publish the data in a widespread journal, start their own company based on the technology, then try to get as much venture funding as possible before their research is debunked. He would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids.
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I don't think we'll ever know how often this sort of thing happened pre-internet, simply because there was not the same level of access and ability to discuss and dissect publications as there is now. But there has always been pressure to publish, and publish first, for all sorts of reasons. It goes with being human (you know, that ego thing).
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