Science hype and celebrity culture make a bad pair

Until about a month ago, physicist Ranga Dias was enjoying burgeoning stardom for a scientist. He was named one of Time magazine's 100 Next Innovators and The New York Times had called the room-temperature superconducting material he supposedly discovered a "magic" substance that would "transform civilization."

But even during the months that he was being exalted by academics, journal editors and the media, other physicists were pointing to evidence of data manipulation and plagiarism. The first paper that catapulted his career was retracted from the journal Nature last September. Earlier this year, another paper was retracted from the Physical Review Letters. Now eight of Dias' collaborators have asked Nature to retract a third paper, published in March.

It's just one of several ongoing scandals about dubious results getting into top journals, including a recent claim that climatologists have to exaggerate the risks of climate change to get published in Nature. That's a politicized and misleading slant on a real problem: High-impact journals, including Nature, are biased toward sexy, newsworthy papers, so puffing up the significance or originality of one's own work, in any field, might help a scientist gain entry.

If you're trying to get into Nature, "humility is punished, or strongly discouraged," said Ivan Oransky, the co-founder of the blog Retraction Watch. That may help explain why Nature would take a second paper from the Dias group despite questions about research integrity. The findings are impressive, if true.

And even if there was data manipulation, the materials might superconduct as claimed. History points to cases where scientists manipulated data but were still right. Russell Hemley, a physicist at the University of Illinois, has done experiments on similar materials, and recently replicated one of Dias's findings. Hemley told me he stands by all his own work, though other physicists worry this second result is in error.

Superconductors were a surprise discovery in the early 20th century. When cooled with liquid helium, the electrons would pair up, though they'd normally strongly repel each other. The pairs flow in an electrical current with zero resistance, and in the process create a powerful magnetic field. Scientists have long been working to get the phenomenon to work at more easily achievable temperatures. A room-temperature superconductor has been a sort of holy grail.

So Dias' findings are the kind of extraordinary claim that Carl Sagan referred to as needing extraordinary evidence — but even if true, wouldn't necessarily transform civilization as the Times claimed.

"When we discover things in general in physics, but in condensed matter physics in particular, we never know what direction it's going to take us," said Peter Armitage, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University. A room-temperature superconductor might still need to be chilled to get enough current to be useful. How it would be used depends heavily on the creativity of applied scientists and engineers.

The first Dias paper claimed the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor that worked at extremely high pressure. The second, more surprising Nature paper, claimed that another material, made from the rare earth lutetium combined with hydrogen and nitrogen, worked at room temperature and less extreme pressure.

Several physicists looked at the first Nature paper, published in 2020 and now retracted, and found that some graphs had been copied from other papers, representing experiments done years earlier. More problems surfaced in the now-retracted paper from the Physical Review Letters. Physicist James Hamlin told me he noticed some passages that looked familiar. They turned out to be copied from Hamlin's thesis. He later discovered that much of Dias' thesis had been plagiarized from his own. Then there was the second Nature paper, which the journal inexplicably accepted despite these earlier problems. (Editors at Nature have defended their decision to accept the second paper from Dias by saying they judge each paper on its own merit.)

Retractions aren't as rare as one might think. Oransky of Retraction Watch said they see about 5,500 retractions in a typical year. A few are because of some innocent but egregious mistake, but most occur because of suspected manipulation or faking of data or other forms of misconduct. Oransky said journals are rarely transparent about the reasons for retracting a paper. Their opacity is bad for public trust and public understanding of science.

And celebrity culture can lead to an escalation of exaggeration as the journals, universities and funding agents heavily promote high-profile findings to the media. David Sanders, a Purdue University virologist, got involved in examining scientific integrity after 2009, when another scientist claimed to have discovered arsenic-based life. She made a Time 100 list and multiple front-page headlines for finding possibly a second origin of life, or maybe even aliens. None of these big implications were supported by the data presented. Sanders told me that this wasn't a story of the fall of one 15-minute celebrity scientist, but a failure of integrity and critical thinking in academia, at NASA, the journal Science, and the media.

Although a small number of cheaters exist in any human endeavor, most scientists make a sincere effort to advance humanity's understanding of the world. But celebrity culture and the attention economy can wreak havoc with the public face of science. In the end, the only star should be nature itself.