Plastic Fantastic by Eugenie Samuel Reich

Publisher: Macmillan

Year: 2009

Pages: 272

I remember only vaguely, back in 2002, the story of a scientist who had been exposed as one of the biggest frauds in history. At the time, I suppose, I didn’t follow science news nearly as much as I do now; on the other hands, it’s possible that even a story as big as “the greatest physics fraud in the last 50 years” still didn’t register much in the mainstream news.

When I read the premise of Plastic Fantastic, however, I remembered the scant attention I had paid to the story seven years ago.

The story of Jan Hendrik Schön begins around 1997, according to Eugenie Reich. That was around the time that Schön, who would eventually fool most of the physics community for 4 years, was working on his doctorate at the University of Konstanz, in Germany. Schön eventually found his way into Bell Labs, which at that point was the research wing of Lucent Technology. Reich paints Schön the student as a bright, if not extroverted, brilliant, or adventurous student.

But I’m getting ahead of myself; since a reader of Reich’s book (published in 2009) has at least the distinct possibility of knowing about the scandal, Reich opens with an explicit acknowledgment and brief summary of it: Hendrik Schön, a German researcher at Bell Labs, garnered critical and mainstream praise as a scientific genius at the helm of a number of huge scientific breakthroughs before ultimately being exposed as a fraud who had faked most, if not all, of his data. It took, Reich figures, about four years for Schön’s deception to go from casual fudging of data to egregious, wholesale fabrication and eventual discovery. Does this, she asks, represent a success of the much-vaunted scientific self-correction process, or its abject failure? Let’s find out.

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