Fired Lawrence lab physicist's earlier data also questioned

[Susan L Gawarecki <loc@icx.net>]

Accusations of Fraud - Fired Lawrence lab physicist's earlier data also

questioned 

     Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer

     Sunday, July 21, 2002 

     ©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. 



URL:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/07/21/MN141703.DTL&type=science 



     Berkeley -- Victor Ninov was a popular, highly respected physicist

at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the last person anyone would

have expected of a shocking scientific fraud. 



     Now, fraud accusations against Ninov are the climax of the lab's

agonizing repudiation of what once looked like an historic achievement

-- its purported 1999 discovery of the heaviest known element. 



     To his Berkeley friends, Ninov was an amiable, hard-working, highly

professional physicist who could play the violin as well as fix a cranky

lab gadget, who sailed across the Pacific on a 45-foot sailboat with two

associates, and who was badly hurt in an avalanche while

mountain-climbing about a decade ago . . . and, unfazed, survived to

climb other peaks. 



     But behind closed doors at the lab late last year, Ninov was

accused of faking the "discovery" of element 118, a claim that could

have earned him and his colleagues lasting fame -- if those same

colleagues' suspicions and detective work had not later undermined it. 



     Late last month, in a private meeting with employees, the lab

director acknowledged a single staffer had faked results in the

experiment; lab officials have refused to name the suspect. On July 13,

The Chronicle identified Ninov as the accused person. Ninov has since

acknowledged being the accused, but he denies all guilt. 



     Now Ninov's role in the discovery of two other new elements has

come under scrutiny. This month European and Russian researchers

published a paper revealing "spuriously created" data in mid-1990s

experiments that reported the existence of elements 110 and 112. Ninov

was second author on the original papers that reported the results of

those experiments, which were conducted at his former place of

employment, a scientific research institute called GSI, run by the

German government. 



RESEARCHER SAYS HE'S INNOCENT



     Lawrence Berkeley scientists were stunned by their conclusion that

Ninov had faked the lab's data, fakery that seemed "impossible to

believe" based on their respect and personal affection for him, said

Lawrence Berkeley nuclear scientist Albert Ghiorso, 87, one of the grand

old men of nuclear science. 



     Lawrence Berkeley, a 4,000-employee lab that the University of

California runs under contract to the U.S. Energy Department, suspended

Ninov last autumn, 



     then fired him earlier this year. Since then he has pursued a

grievance hearing against the lab. 



     Ninov insists on his innocence. The native of Bulgaria says he

never committed scientific fraud at Berkeley, GSI or any place else. 



     "There was no dirty trick involved on my side," said Ninov, 43, a

Stockton resident, in a telephone interview and e-mail exchange. "I have

always nd continue to hold myself to the highest standards of conduct

during experiments, in analysis and interpretation of experimental

data." 



     Ninov claimed he antagonized other researchers at the Berkeley

laboratory by insisting on caution before announcing the discovery of

the new element, 118, but he gave few details. 



     "Definitely I'm a scapegoat for the whole (Berkeley) laboratory,"

Ninov said. 



     At stake is a long-standing scientific mystery: How big can atoms

get? Like wedding cakes and card castles, atoms can grow only so big

before they become unstable and collapse. But how big is "so big"?

Experts disagree; their debate reflects our incomplete understanding of

the underlying structure of matter. 



     Atoms are the smallest components of matter that can engage in

chemical reactions. They consist of three basic particles -- positively

charged protons, uncharged neutrons and negatively charged electrons.

Like charges repel, so by themselves, the positively charged protons

drive each other apart.  But inside a stable atom, the neutrons add

enough subatomic "strong force" (a kind of micro-rubber cement) to force

the protons and neutrons together in the nucleus. Tiny electrons orbit

the nucleus, like gnats swirling around fruit. 



     As atoms get bigger and bigger, though, the collective repulsive

force of protons may become too great, and the atoms fall apart in the

process known as radioactivity. That's why some very heavy atoms have

extremely short lifetimes, measured in fractions of a second. 



     Decades ago, though, physicists wondered whether "superheavy"

elements around 114 might stabilize. They speculated about an "island of

stability," some elements of which might last up to a billion-odd years.

Some fantasized about exotic technological applications of such massive

atoms, say in designing new materials. Some have even hunted for clear

signs of "superheavies" in nature -- in hot springs, meteorites, lunar

rocks -- but so far without success. 



     In 1999, Berkeley officials announced their researchers had

discovered the heaviest known element, the superheavy element dubbed

118, and its decay product 116. (The elements are named for their atomic

numbers, meaning the number of protons in an atom.) 



     The 15-member team reported its findings in the journal Physical

Review Letters in an article titled, "Observation of superheavy nuclei

produced in the reaction of Krypton-86 with Lead-208." Ninov was the

lead author. 



     Previously, many physicists had doubted 118 could be easily

created. Thus the 118 detection "was completely unexpected," even to

members of the Berkeley team, said Walter Loveland, a nuclear chemist

who played a key role in investigating the case, in a phone interview

Thursday. 



     Then-Energy Department Secretary Bill Richardson called it "a

stunning discovery which opens the door to further insights into the

structure of the atomic nucleus." 



     But Berkeley's pride was short-lived. Disturbing news soon arrived

from abroad. Nuclear researchers in Germany, France and Japan were

unable to create 118. 



     Ghiorso acknowledges that initially he and his colleagues were

unperturbed by the foreigners' doubts. The foreign instruments lacked

adequate "sensitivity" -- that was one Berkeley excuse for the overseas

labs' failure to find 118. 



     Finally, though, the Berkeley scientists grew nervous and repeated

their original experiment. As before, they did so by firing a beam of

krypton atoms at a spinning wheel covered with banana-shaped lead

plates. They chose krypton and lead because these elements have atomic

numbers of 36 and 82, respectively. 



     They fire these elements together at high speed in order to smash

through the repulsive forces of their positively charged nuclei, thus

combining the nuclei into bigger atoms. Because 36 + 82 = 118, an

infinitesimal percentage of atoms theoretically could combine into

element 118. 



     Such an experiment can take weeks: It generates an average of just

one 118 atom per week, out of every million billion atoms knocked off

the lead target. 



     "It's the ultimate looking for a needle in a haystack," Loveland

joked. 



     Ninov participated in the replication experiment. 



     "Partway through this experiment, Victor announced to the group he

had found another 118 atom," Loveland said. Naturally, "there was a lot

of excitement." 



     Yet when they compared Ninov's analysis of the data with their own

analysis, 



     they found baffling discrepancies. Initially, they respected Ninov

too much to doubt him. 



     "At first I think everyone, ourselves included, thought that (the

discrepancy) was due to our ineptitude," Loveland recalled with a laugh.

"We persisted (analyzing the data) through much of that weekend, to try

to find this (118) event -- and we didn't." 



     Said Ghiorso: "When we couldn't repeat (the original finding) with

better sensitivity, then we knew something was wrong. That was when the

detective work began here. Finally it was Walter Loveland who ran it

down." 



     Loveland recalled confronting Ninov: "He showed us the files that

he pulled up on the computer that showed the (118) event -- and the

event was clearly there. We said to ourselves, 'My God, how is this

possible?' " 



     Puzzled, other team members also tried to detect the 118 signal

using their own software -- again, without luck. 



     "So at that point," Loveland said, "it was clear that something was

wrong." 



     But what? The Berkeley scientists submitted a report to Physical

Review Letters that withdrew the original claim. Ninov refused -- and

still refuses -- to sign the retraction paper. 



     Somehow, in Ghiorso's opinion, Ninov "planted" spurious data in the

computer tape. 



     "Why he did it, we have no idea," said Ghiorso. "He's one of the

most competent people I ever met in the field of nuclear physics." 



SUSPECT DATA IN GERMANY



     Then came the recent report from his ex-colleagues in Germany. 



     In the mid-1990s, when Ninov worked at GSI, he was second author on

two papers reporting the discovery of elements 110 and 112. After the

Berkeley data came into question, GSI scientists tried to repeat the

earlier experiments. They found "spuriously created" data in the 1994

and 1996 experiments, they report in a paper published in the latest

issue of European Physical Journal A. 



     "We found inconsistency of the data, which led to the conclusion,

that for reasons not yet known to us, part of the data . . . were

spuriously created," says the paper by 15 scientists from GSI, Russia,

Slovakia and Finland. 



     The "spuriously created" data resulted from human meddling, not

from a technical glitch in the GSI experiment, said Sigurd Hofmann,

Ninov's former GSI colleague, in e-mail correspondence with The

Chronicle. Hofmann was the lead author on the paper reporting the two

new elements. 



     "Victor Ninov was responsible in 1994 and 1996 for data files which

he extracted from the original files written during the experiment,"

Hofmann said. 



     Again, Ninov denied wrongdoing both by phone and e-mail: "I didn't

do anything wrong, from my point of view, at GSI as well as in

Berkeley." 



     Noting that he holds to the "highest standards" of scientific

conduct, Ninov added: "I learned these standards from excellent

scientists like Sigurd Hofmann." 



     The fabricated data at Berkeley and GSI are especially embarrassing

because they occur in a field that can't afford a lot of negative press.

Atomic

     nuclei research was glamorous during the Cold War: The public

tended to mistakenly associate it with A-bombs and the professed wonders

of uclear power. (In reality, specialists in atomic nuclei rarely have

much to do with either technology.) 



     Since then, though, the media spotlight has shifted to more

gee-whiz topics on both much bigger and much smaller scales, from the

infinities of cosmological physics to the infinitesimals of "string"

theory. 



     The failure to fulfill an old dream by detecting long-lived

superheavy elements hasn't eased the situation; those found tend to

disintegrate very quickly, as fast as fractions of a second. 



     "Our present theoretical understanding leaves it very unlikely that

long-lived superheavy elements exist," says Paul Gerhard-Reinhard, a

physics professor at the University of Erlangen in Germany. 



     While declining to blame anyone for the fraud, Witek Nazarewicz, a

leading superheavy element scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in

Tennessee, expresses amazement that any scientist would commit such an

act. 



     "Why would somebody put his or her life's reputation at stake and

make a data fabrication?" Nazarewicz asked. "It's just crazy, because

such things are brought to light sooner or later. There are very few

cases like this, but they give us (nuclear scientists) a black eye." 



E-mail Keay Davidson at kdavidson@sfchronicle.com. 

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.   Page A - 3 

-- 

.....................................................

Susan L. Gawarecki, Ph.D., Executive Director

Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee

102 Robertsville Road, Suite B, Oak Ridge, TN 37830

Toll free 888-770-3073 ~ www.local-oversight.org

.....................................................

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