IP: Lab (LBNL) Reports Misconduct in Claim of New Elemen

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

July 14, 2002
Lab Reports Misconduct in Claim of New Element
By GEORGE JOHNSON

A year after an international team of scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley 
National Laboratory in California withdrew the claim that it had discovered 
a new element — the heaviest so far — officials at the laboratory have 
concluded that the flawed research was the result of scientific misconduct, 
officials said on Friday.

The laboratory's director, Charles Shank, acknowledged at an employees' 
meeting on June 25 that scientific misconduct had occurred, said Ron Kolb, 
who is in charge of communications at Lawrence Berkeley.

"The laboratory has taken appropriate corrective action to deal with the 
individual involved in the fabrication," Mr. Kolb said in an e-mail 
interview on Friday.

He said the researcher, whom he said he could not identify because of 
personnel rules, was challenging the finding through the laboratory.

Fifteen names appeared on the paper announcing the discovery, which was 
published on Aug. 9, 1999, in Physical Review Letters. Working with a 
cyclotron in a Berkeley laboratory, the team reported that it had bombarded 
lead with krypton and yielded the new substance. The team called it element 
118 because of its logical position in the periodic table. After several 
laboratories, including Lawrence Berkeley, could not repeat the experiment, 
the original data were reanalyzed.

"We discovered some data had been massaged," said Dr. Lee S. Schroeder, 
director of the nuclear science division at the laboratory. "Scientific 
integrity is the currency we deal in. We absolutely have to maintain the 
highest level."
A formal retraction will appear in the July 15 issue of the journal.

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