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From the title alone, this book easily caught my attention when I was searching for an interesting book to read. In Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World, Eugenie Reich documents how Jan Hendrik Schon, a German researcher at Bell Laboratories, committed fraud and in the process misleading the scientific community from his colleagues to editors of renowned scientific journals. This book is based on a comprehensive research conducted by the author, including interviews from well over a hundred sources related to Schon's works.

Early in the decade, Schon worked in the then new and upcoming field of organic electronics with much success. He published exceptionally numerous papers on the field and at one point, he was submitting close to 4 or 5 articles per month, most of which went to prestigious journals such as Nature and Science. Back then, his papers made such tremendous claims such as being able to create superconducting organic plastics, among other discoveries. Paper after paper, he achieved immense popularity in the community for his seemingly gifted research prowess.

Due to this success, many researches spent years and large amount resources to replicate his work but to no avail. One specific issue was his irreproducible sputtering technique of aluminum oxide on organic crystal transistor which reached high mobilities compared to results obtained by other following researchers. By late 2002, unable to reproduce his work and frustrated with his ambiguous explanations, some of his colleagues grew more and more suspicious of his results. Some of his co-workers eventually found out that he has been reusing the same graphs in different papers. After a formal investigation by Bell Labs, it was revealed that Schon had for years been committing scientific misconduct. It has been proven that he recycled graphs representing data from one type of material for another. Furthermore, he also did extensive manipulation of data as well making up of entire data, with some graphs, for example, looked to have been made by matching a known equation which lack the noise or jitter that typically distinguishes genuine experimental data.

As a result of the Schon case, many problematic practices in the scientific research community were highlighted. For example, the results that laboratories and research centers produce may be compromised as they hurry to compete with one another for research that could have profitable industrial applications and to secure additional funding. Also, the credibility of the peer-review process and the journals themselves has been questioned especially since even the top journals like Nature and Science failed to detect the fraudulent works of Schon early on. It can be said that the discovery of this fraud triggered a 9/11-like aftershock in the scientific research world as it prompted many journals spearheaded by Nature and Science to change their policies and become more stringent in their requirements for accepting manuscripts for publication.

This book proved to be a well-written narrative of one of the most outlandish scientific fraud in recent times and is a must-read especially for those who are in the semiconductor and nanotechnology fields. Although the real motivation of Schon for committing such fraud was not answered in the book and remains a mystery, his case will remain as one of the most intriguing stories from which we could learn valuable lessons.