Bell Labs Withdrawing Patent Applications
From Times Wire Reports
Bell Labs will withdraw patent applications on work by a physicist who was fired last month for falsifying a string of breakthrough experiments in electronics.
The research laboratory fired Jan Hendrik Schon on Sept. 24 after a panel of outside experts concluded he had made up or altered experimental data at least 16 times between 1998 and 2001.
Bell Labs has begun notifying the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and some foreign patent offices that it is withdrawing applications for six patents, lab spokesman Saswato Das said in Trenton. “Bell Labs takes matters of scientific integrity very seriously,” he said.
Schon’s findings were published in about 80 scientific journals.
