My 2009 book, Plastic Fantastic: How The Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World, described the fraud of physicist Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Laboratories.
In 2025, I released a second edition with the same content but at a much more affordable price. This is available on Amazon as a paperback or ebook.
Bell Labs was the birthplace of the transistor and one of the leading U.S. industrial laboratories of the 20th century. Schön’s fraud there ultimately resulted in a dozen coordinated retractions of articles in the leading academic journals, Nature and Science. The book documents the incentives and pressures that enabled the case. Many of these have escalated in the intervening years and continue to drive fraud in science today.Traditionally, internal review procedures would have prevented the publication of unreliable or fraudulent research at Bell Labs. But in 2000, the financial pressure of the dot-com collapse damaged critical thinking and debate in basic research operations. As the stock price plummeted, the appeal of easy publicity derived from publication in high-profile, glossy, scientific journals incentivized shortcuts in the previously rigorous internal review. Schön was profiled in the annual report of Bell’s parent corporation, Lucent Technologies. Meanwhile, early career researchers from the U.S. to Europe and Asia spent countless hours and lab resources failing to replicate his fabricated experiments.
My reporting for the book began after October 2002, when Bell Labs published an investigation report that laid bare many of Schön’s worst fabrications. This report, coming a few short months after allegations of fraud appeared in the press, was the result of Schön’s scientific critics, the whistleblowers of his fraud, and eventually the institution, taking the courageous but necessary steps to clarify the situation. Such transparency is rarely seen from research organizations today.