Grainy Boundaries

“Shit, Cinemar is here already here, making the rounds before the plenary,” Emilie sighed into the phone heavily. “Yeah, I gotta go. Yes. Muah. No… I just don’t want to be spotted.” “Shit…” she exhaled after she was, in fact, spotted. This was not the time for what she was sure was to be a harangue from her senior colleague.

She smiled and fake-waved at Janice Cinemar who beamed over at her over the top of the crowd. Tall and striking, she overtopped Emilie by at least 4" and she wore dress boots with 4” heels. Hell, she was taller than most of the men.

“Bob, I’ve got to go. I don’t want to do this now. I told you he’s not here… Yeah, kiss Bobby and Joey for me. I’ve got to go find the NSF people, and Janice is on her way over here already.  Yes… I’ve got to go… Go.” She clapped her clamshell phone together just in time.

Janice waded through a crowd of conference attendees who were fumbling with tote bags and awkward badges near the check-in desks. Many of them were thumbing through the updated program and there was a bit of buzz in the air for the updated plenary address. The younger attendees traded meal and drink vouchers and gifts from vendors while their supervisors did some preliminary schmoozing. As Janice reached Emilie, her expansive smile widened to threatening proportions. Her eyes told the real story as they stared daggers into the younger woman. “Emilie,” she boomed. “How lovely to see you!”  

“Is it. Lovely, that is? Look Jan, I had a rough flight back…”

“Did you? So sorry to hear that,” Janice stage-whispered passive-aggressively in mock sympathy. “I heard you had a REMARKABLE conversation with Summer Murphy regarding the alumina layers.” Remarkable was drawn out poisonously.

Emilie paused for a moment and pressed her thumb and index finger against her aching eyeballs. They were really going to do this right here in front of everyone. Beadlescombe from Stanford was eavesdropping from 6 feet away and closing in loops of ever decreasing radius around them.

“Janice, C’mon, it just doesn’t add up. How is he sputtering from 4 centimeters and getting coatings of that quality? He didn’t even present images of the devices. The grain boundaries just magically align? Carrier scattering at the interface has to swamp whatever switching effect he claims to be measuring. You and I both know that the best he can hope for is a parasitic effect” Emilie noticed Beadlescombe jerk to a halt at her assertion.

A malevolent smile bloomed over the older woman’s face. “So, because you lack the skill and talent to reproduce his results, you’re going to smear a younger colleague’s reputation? You, know he is said to have magic hands…” She broke off after the last part and sighed. “It’s unbecoming, really.” “Moreover, It’s beneath you,” she pompously added.

Emilie sighed audibly again. The flight, her conversation about the affair, this matter. Her day really couldn’t have gone much worse, could it?

“It is refreshing to see you confident again. Confident enough that you know more than the reviewers at Nature and Science.” “And the editors,” she intoned. “Are we sure you’re really not just frustrated at your own inabilities?”

“Right, and that’s what this is really about,” Emilie said quietly and paused to look directly in her former mentor’s eyes. A momentary flicker in Janice’s hardened gaze betrayed her and she blinked several times until her features froze again. She collected herself and strode off, taking a parting shot.

“Well, if you’ll excuse me, I have to deliver the plenary. Hope to see you there. Perhaps I can help clear up your confusion.”

Emilie sighed and checked in to the conference. Fortunately, she was staying on-site, so she went to her room and dialed in to the university to check her email. There were no answers to her queries on Schön’s work.

Earlier that day, she led a 7 AM group meeting where they discussed their inability to reproduce organic transistor results from Bell Laboratories. Results that promised to upend the computer industry - some $70 billion dollars profit in the US alone last year. The revolution that they had been promised for so long had come. It was no longer futuristic like room temperature superconductors or fusion research. This was heads-up displays for for everyone, brain implants, and smart underwear that could sense disease. Right here and right now, not on a movie, not in the holodeck. The Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects program had already spent close to a hundred million dollars on it’s mesoscale integrated conformal electronics program and Schön’s work made it obsolete. State of the art conformal electronics operated with a smallest length scale of approximately 1 mm and he had produced results on objects that were close to a million times smaller. It was as if he had magnified the head on a pin and counted the angels dancing.

The results were extraordinary and had far-reaching implications that threatened to dwarf that of the original transistor, made at the very same laboratory 54 years earlier. Computers could become cheap, light, transparent, flexible, and ubiquitous. Silicon processing with all of it’s complexity and insanely difficult methodologies would largely be replaced by fairly simple chemistry kits. Instead of the toxic materials and environmentally destructive by-products involved in silicon chip manufacturing, one could work with polymers and small molecules that were light and mostly harmless.

There were words for this type of technology - emergent or disruptive. As Emilie explained to her research group, there were others too. Fraud or Hoax - take your pick. She looked at her grad students and postdocs and their devastated faces, but they already knew what she knew. Schön’s results were too good to be true and the last 16 months of lab work was largely wasted on nonsense. Grant applications, Ph.D. dissertations, potential journal publications, and conferences presentations were all rendered null and void by her uncovering of the big lie. All across the country the brightest minds in chemistry, physics, and materials science were feverishly at work in this field and puzzling over why they could not replicate Bell Lab’s results. It wasn’t the first time it took the best researchers in the country some time to catch up to an advancement from Bell Labs, but it was the first time that it was the result of monumental fraud.

Various explanations were floated, including Schön’s ‘magic hands,’ the sputtering apparatus he used at Konstanz being ‘custom’ and unique somehow, and finally bulk incompetence for everyone but those researchers at Murray Hill and their confederates. Finally, Occam’s razor had sliced the problem thin. The simplest explanation was that the data was faked. Forged even. There were not devices to image or do an autopsy on, because they never existed.

Emilie felt terrible for Janice, who was about to tarnish a long and highly reputable research career in her talk. She wanted to believe in Schön’s results because the results he obtained and delivered to her justified a large body of her work on superconductors. She would be nominated for prizes based on what she would present that night. Sadly, by the time they were awarded, the greatest scientific hoax of the generation would tarnish Janice Cinemar’s career beyond repair.

As insufferable as she was as a Ph.D. supervisor, Emilie sympathized with Janice and wished she could head her off somehow. That morning after her group meeting, she flew to Newark and rented a car to drive down the technology Mecca of the US, Murray Hill Bell Laboratories. Six Nobel prizes had been awarded for work performed there, and she made a point to note the plaques as she flashed her temporary badge to pass through the visitor’s center. She relayed her concerns directly to Summer Murphy, the division director. The fact that Janice knew what they were already didn’t sit well. She liked it even less that in-house counsel sat I the meeting and a paralegal took notes.

At issue was a large chunk of the $10.3 million dollar materials research center center grant that the National Science Foundation was about to award to a consortium of schools in the New York City area with Bell Labs designated as one of the external labs. This would lead to additional investment and grant monies that were crucial to support research at the lab in the period of historic downsizing. When Lucent spun off Agere, the basic research budget took a hit. When the technical staff was cut in about half, the research capacity took another hit. Those in a position to help recognized that the greatest research laboratory that had ever been created was having an existential crisis. The loss of the center money coupled with the hit that their reputation would take might finally signal the end for Ma Bell’s invention shoppe and patent printing press.  

Emilie sighed and reviewed the reports from the day’s lab results. Using identical conditions to that which Schön had reported. her students tried to replicate the device structures from which he supposedly obtained his landmark data for organic transistors.  She had gone through extraordinary measures to reproduce his work - even clean-room conditions, but she couldn’t. Today’s data was no different and she hadn’t expected it to be. She just read the electron microscopy reports instead of waiting the interminable period for the images to download through her 56K modem connection. Columnar defects and adhesion problems presented themselves immediately. There was no way that this structure would ever function as even a microelectronic device. It would immediately short out and disappear in a puff of blue smoke. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so sad.

After a few months of trying to reproduce the device structures, she had a moment of pique and frustration, in which she chose an earlier paper of his to try to replicate. Maybe we should walk before we run, she thought. Even that proved beyond her ken and she was initially dismayed and humiliated. Finally, she was alerted to the chatter on sci.research and sci.electronics by one of her students, and it dawned on her that there was nothing wrong with her researchers, equipment, or technique. They were chasing a ghost, that’s all.  Even I the best case scenario, the consensus was building that Schön wasn’t measuring the thing he thought he was.  It didn’t fit the device dimensions he claimed. The electronics people didn’t know what she knew, though.  There was no physical possibility that he made the structures that he claimed to make. None.

The last few weeks had been brutal. She had meetings with the students collectively and individually. Students who had begun their dissertation research were the most affected. They had already passed the departmental qualifying exams, done preliminary research, and made a proposal for a project to the faculty, thus becoming Ph.D. candidates. Generally speaking it was downhill sledding from here, and within two years, they would defend their thesis and leave the nest. Not this group though. They were going to suffer. This was a tangible but hidden cost of fraud that would never show up in the balance sheets at Lucent, or anywhere for that matter.

Emilie had been awarded tenure early, so she was not vulnerable, but there were many assistant professors around the country who had bet their research careers on work done by a charlatan. At most universities, tenure was voted on after six years and was a strictly ‘up or out’ proposition. There was no forgiveness for hitching your wagon to the wrong star. Careers would be ruined, or, for students like hers, be over before they began. Now to save hers, they’d have to pivot dramatically and retool the lab. Shit, she might even get samples from Janice again if she had to. She’d do what she had to in order to care for her flock, but right now, she was tired, so tired. She made so many accommodations for the people in her life and it felt like none were made for her. She eyed the two tabs of Ambien that she had stuffed into the laptop bag and wondered if she’d need them. She felt guilty for staying overnight, but there was no way that she was driving back to Worcester after the talks and the poster session.

Her career was at a bit of a crossroads. The next step up the ladder would be full professor, but she might have some difficulty with that now. She didn’t want to be stuck at Associate for much longer and Tufts had done little to show that they were really interested in her priorities. She was a bit of an orphan in Physics and really would have been a better fit in the Engineering school, but this was where the line was. She could tell during the interview that they were eager to add a woman to their ranks as the optics of an all-male department was not so great in the new millennium. Still, it hadn’t stopped a crusty old fart from leaning over at dinner and sneering that her “research was rather applied,” as if that was some sort of disqualifying attribute.  His work was in theoretical condensed matter physics, so god forbid that anyone actually do something useful in his world, that was really engineering.

Still, she swallowed her pride and the substandard lab they gave her in a department that really didn’t want her. Bob already had his heart set on a house in Worcester so that they could be near his family and the die felt like they were cast.  Seven years later, tenure, and two kids, her marriage was on the rocks. She had been caught in an affair with a resident at the hospital and she really didn’t know what’s next. Now Bob was possessive and checking on her constantly. She was pretty sure that he had that creepy ex-cop who worked for him follow her and thats’ how she got caught. Bob made a big show of threatening the young doctor and that’s the last she saw of him. Recently, she heard that he was at Boston General, but she really didn’t care any more. Their relationship didn’t have any legs, but he was good for the occasional Xanax and Ambien when she needed it and didn’t feel like getting a prescription.  In retrospect, she should probably have picked somewhere better than the Red Roof Inn, but she honestly didn’t think Bob cared.

The truth was she would have put up with the weird phone sex and massage parlors if he had been straight with her when she asked about them. The charges were right there on the phone bill and he continued to protest his innocence. Or if he lifted a finger in the morning to help her with the kids I the slightest way. Instead, he made a big show of making her a sandwich the night before and he’d leave for work before the kids got up. He was probably working on his short game at the club or some other diversion because she knew he wasn’t at the office. But he’d do anything but admit that he got caught in a lie.

Now Bob thought that she was sleeping with one of her students and she’d had enough. She left the kid back at the lab and told him to sit this one out. He was confused and grateful but everyone else in her group was expected to make an appearance over the next few days. 

So she settled on a plan and started writing to-do lists. They would pivot to photovoltaics and superconductivity again, maybe even some work with organic crystals. She’d salvage these kids and get them through. Then, she’d make a decision about her career and where she’d move next. She was done with Bob, and done being accommodating. It hadn’t served her well. First, though, she had to watch her former mentor make a fool out of herself in tonight’s plenary address.