“This has GOT TO BE bullshit!”… Personal reflections on the Ranga Dias affair.

In October 2020, Nature published a paper reporting room-temperature superconductivity under pressure [1], one of the so-called ‘Holy Grails’ of condensed matter physics. The main author was Ranga Dias of Rochester University.

The quote in the title? That was precisely what I shouted to my wife when I saw it on my computer at home. It was, in kinder times, what would have been described as a ‘marmalade dropper’. A shocker. A real stinker. Surprisingly, I later learned that my gut reaction was a heterodox one. Many experts in superconductivity genuinely believed the discovery, swayed by Nature’s hallmark rigour, and commitment to scientific excellence. At Rochester, venture capitalists were courting Dias’ start-up, which would go on to raise 17 million dollars. Unknown to most of us, the editors of Nature had actually ignored the majority opinion of the peer reviewers, who had expressed serious concerns [2]. This article is my account of what happened next, and how the events fit into the bigger academic picture.

At the time, I didn’t care much for room-temperature superconductivity, since my own career was already circling the plug hole. I’d had enough of academia and academics, and was feeling very unhappy. Unfortunately, I was tied to Dias by a totally unrelated piece of science [3], an obscure mineral called Hauerite (MnS₂). A long-standing collaborator had asked Dias to measure its electrical resistance under pressure, back in ~2017. I never actually met Dias, he was just described to me as ‘a guy with magic hands’. After a prolonged gestation, the paper appeared in Physical Review Letters in June 2021.

By this time, I’d decided not to apply for tenure in Dijon, and would be unemployed in 2022. Meanwhile, some criticisms of the Nature superconductivity paper were appearing [4]. Complex issues related to noise in the data sets, and the sharpness of some features. In September 2022, the paper was retracted, due to  “a non-standard, user-defined [background subtraction] procedure.”.  All co-authors disagreed with the decision, and stood by their work. I told my wife that I was glad to have just the one paper as a co-author with Dias and collaborators. There but for the grace of God, and all that…

On Oct 27th, 2022, the bombshell arrived, in the form of an email from Dr. James Hamlin of the University of Florida (reproduced here). The attached document showed data from our MnS₂ paper, scaled and overlaid on data from Dias’ thesis, for a completely different material. Three separate data sets matched perfectly [5], including one feature that looked like an instrumental glitch.

Think that you have seen an academic angry? Picture a brooding Scottish scientist, already prone to melodrama, and disturbed on a family holiday.  Misled, and embroiled in what was very likely scientific misconduct.  Objects flew, rare and unusual Anglo-Saxon curses were invoked, and the plots were checked again and again. I was not going down for this one! The following evening, I composed a response to the journal, stating that “this paper should be retracted without delay”, and offered cooperation with any independent investigation (Spoiler: none has ever contacted me). 

At this point, the story gets really weird. Things would rumble on at Physical Review Letters, and an independent investigation would eventually conclude that scientific misconduct had occurred. Our paper was retracted on the 15th Aug. 2023. However, throughout the fall of 2022, I heard nothing, nada, zilch. This was partially due to a mistake with email addresses made by the journal, and partially due to a complete break down in communication with my co-authors, who continued to proclaim their innocence. In fact, there was a lot of fighting going on elsewhere. The retraction of the Nature paper had been driven by the investigations of Prof. Jorge Hirsch at the University of California San Diego. Standing alone, and later with a handful of collaborators, he had forced the authors to reveal the raw data behind the plots. In return, he was subject to a campaign of intimidation, with an anonymous “community letter” circulated worldwide [6]. This contained allegations of personal misconduct, and scientific incompetence. Legal threats were made to some critics, and senior university administrators circulated letters of protest.

The thing is, as a community, we’d been here before. In the early 2000’s, Bell Laboratories had been engulfed by the Jan Hendrik Schön scandal. He had fabricated data for field effect transistors, superconducting transitions, you name it. After anomalies were noticed in his data, and Lucent Technologies conducted an inquiry, at least 28 papers were retracted. These included no fewer than seven Nature papers, and eight in Science.

However, the phenomenology was markedly different. Schön was a staff scientist, who worked almost alone. His few co-authors either supplied raw materials, or were his supervisors. All were exonerated by the investigation. The investigation led to well-publicised reflections on the responsibilities of co-authors, and came at a time when ‘big team’ science was beginning to predominate. Most people assumed that a repeat scandal was impossible.

Meanwhile, Dias ran a large group with multiple students and post-docs. He held millions in dollars of funding, including a National Science Foundation early career award, and money from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. He collaborated widely, notably with a large group at the University of Nevada: Las Vegas, and was attached to a Department of Energy laser laboratory. A confident and convincing speaker, he would boast of the investors in his startup, and his results. He made the 2021 Time Magazine TIME100 Next list.

Just getting a foot in the door as a tenure track professor is extremely difficult nowadays. Candidates must develop a strong CV through publications, and post-doctoral training in prestigious laboratories. The application package includes letters of recommendation from notable scientists, statements on research, teaching, contributions to diversity and so on. Many universities contact former employers to check for any undisclosed personal misconduct. Academics talk. Taken all together, it is clear that dozens (maybe hundreds), of collaborators, reviewers, editors and program managers, must have actively supported Dias. Furthermore, he was embedded in a hot topic research field that was exciting funders and researchers worldwide. It is hard to imagine a wrong ‘un slipping through the net.

This is perhaps why efforts to alert the system ran up against a brick wall. It was going to get a lot worse, before it got any better.

Fast-forward to Spring 2023, and rumours swirl of another accepted Nature paper from Dias. This time, the claim was even more fantastic: room temperature superconductivity at much lower pressures. Almost simultaneously, allegations of large scale plagiarism in his PhD thesis spread. Large sections appeared to have been lifted straight from the thesis of none other than James Hamlin [7]. I then found many examples of remarkable similarities with journal articles, including papers written by his PhD supervisor. Talking to Science Magazine, Choong-Shik Yoo claimed to have detected it at the time: “I thought that that was just a simple mistake, so I didn’t think of that as a big deal,”.

Journalists were now sniffing around, fuelled by the embargoed press release of the new Nature paper. I was shown a copy, and immediately saw problems. In fact, so had the referees. I have since seen what are alleged to be their reports. Devastatingly, one says that: “... the data analysis should be particularly careful to avoid [a] new Schoen affair”. The editors allegedly chose to publish anyway [2].

On the 19th February 2023 (pre-publication), I wrote to Prof. Wendi Heinzelman, Dean of the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Rochester, and point of contact for academic misconduct. My email described the on-going situation with our MnS₂ Physical Review Letters paper, and invited her to compare the thesis of Dias with the earlier one of James Hamlin. Her terse response suggested that I contact my co-authors instead. I learned later, that Rochester had already performed several internal investigations, and exonerated Dias for the first Nature retraction.  

On April 14th, 2023 I also contacted Dr. Stacy Springs, who was in charge of scientific misconduct at Harvard University. This was because Dias continued to maintain personal web pages there, following his post-doc. As can be seen below, these contained substantial textual similarities with papers in the literature. Unsurprisingly, little happened. These pages remained live for many months afterward, and I received no substantive response.

Finally, on the 7th of March 2023, the nuclear option.  I wrote to the Nature editor Tobias Roedel, stating that I had seen the forthcoming paper, and that it had obvious scientific flaws. I did not receive a response until some days after the paper appeared.

When the second Nature paper was published on the 8th March, 2023, the reason for Rochester’s reticence became clear. They had gone all in. Really screwed the pooch. Epic facepalms all around.

Fawning press releases described how Dias had discovered a new material he dubbed “reddmatter”, inspired by Star Trek.  Even worse, they released a professionally produced YouTube video. This featured Dias, his head of department, and none other than… Dean Wendi Heinzelman, the person responsible for academic misconduct, whom I had contacted. Throughout the video, the Rochester ‘high heidyins’ [8] enthusiastically describe how they intend to become a national centre for superconductivity research. Predictably, the official version of this video has now vanished from the public record. However, the connoisseur of the university self-own genre can still find an illicit copy with a little Googling [9].

In fact, dozens of other scientists worldwide had also been stridently sounding the alarm. Rochester, the National Science Foundation Office of Inspector General, and the Department of Energy whistle blower hotline were contacted by multiple people. Journalists writing for Le Monde, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and more specialist outlets, chased the story hard. It really was a fire storm. Most impressively, student journalists at the Rochester Campus Times broke the news of the retraction of our MnS₂ paper [10].

Indeed, the Dias affair eventually ground to its inevitable and bloody conclusion. In 2024, the results of an independent review commissioned by Rochester leaked. This had been imposed on the University by the National Science Foundation. The report concluded that:

“…the Investigation Committee finds that Respondent engaged in falsification, fabrication, and/or plagiarism of data, images, and text… “

“…the evidence indicates that there was a significant departure from accepted research practice; that the misconduct was committed with at least recklessness; and that it is more likely than not that research misconduct occurred.“

“Respondent’s actions are part of a pattern—starting from his work as a graduate student at Washington State University (“WSU”).”

Dias’ Washington State University PhD thesis is an interesting case. At some point, I found myself copied on an email exchange between senior university officials, after alerting them to possible plagiarism. I took the chance, and asked them to do the right thing, to “remember the unique leadership position of America, and American universities”. That said, I also “prefer[ed] not to know how the sausage is made going forward”.

The thesis has now reappeared in abridged form. Much text has been replaced, a few figures and results erased. No explanation. I personally wasn’t aware that we could go back and fix stuff like that. Many of us have a few typos to correct, or a dedication  to edit, which profusely thanks an ex-partner. So well done WSU, for inventing this new paradigm of PhD thesis as a ‘living document’. It’s a bit like a disputed Wikipedia article, or an undergraduate term paper, bounced back for rewriting by an automated AI content check.

Speaking of sausages, this article was written in the home of the legendary ‘andouillette’. Made from the lower digestive tracts of the pig.  As they say in these parts:

“La politique, c'est comme l'andouillette, ça doit sentir un peu la merde, mais pas trop.”

[tr: Politics is like andouillette, it must smell a little like shit, but not too much]

A difficult balance to achieve, I am sure readers agree [11]. A family member put it more bluntly: “I’m not eating that, it’s made of arseholes!”.

The last quote from the report which I reproduced above (about a pattern of behaviour) is the most interesting to me. From the remarkable textual similarities between his thesis and Hamlin’s, to the alleged falsification and fabrication of data in his Nature papers, the picture is the same. In every case that can be examined, the mysteries stack up. For example, the YouTube video [12] of his invited seminar at the Department of Physics at Brown University (2017). I watched it, and around 48 minutes, something caught my eye. It is a plot of the resistance of a bunch of sulphides as a function of pressure. It includes data for CS₂, SiS₂, GeS₂ and SnS₂. That is chemically satisfying, since these make up all of the known group IV disulphides (a whole column of elements in the periodic table). Such things are important for ambitious post-docs on the hunt for a tenure track post, as Dias then was.

Nearly the same figure appears in his PhD thesis. There is just one tiny difference. It is missing the data for SiS₂. Indeed, on page 125 of that august tome (First Edition), he states that: “SiS2 is highly reactive with moisture and decomposes; therefore, we have limited our studies on [sic] GeS2 and SnS2.”. You see, I actually read the damn thing. Not only that, but together with James Hamlin, I digitised every such data set in his thesis, and published papers. It turns out that you can also extract data from YouTube screen shots of figures. A bit of plotting, and et voila! With the exception of a few data points, it turns out to be remarkably similar to data from Dias’ thesis for yet another material, OCS. 

It is possible that, after finishing his PhD, he somehow found time to collect data on highly reactive SiS₂. It is also possible that the resistance of SiS₂- and the voltage drop measured across a completely different sample, with a completely different size and shape- turns out to be almost exactly the same as that of OCS. Over pressure-induced changes of more than a factor of a million.

Or, is it possible that the wrong data somehow appeared on a slide, either accidentally or wilfully? That is what really worries me. There is no publication here, no referees, and almost no scientific insights are made. No motivation. It is just a little extra unfinished detail, that presumably grated. Tempting to complete the series. It speaks of a desperate wish to impress, a desperate wish to win. It speaks to me of somebody who boasts about fictitious investors, during a totally inconsequential talk to PhD students, before the YouTube evidence vanishes [13]. It speaks to me of a foolish tenure-track academic, who signs every communication with a flourish, and the grandiose title “Professor Dias”.

I guess we will never know the truth. Dias and collaborators also published data for OCS in a 2016 Scientific Reports paper [14]. This bears no relation to the OCS data in his thesis. Confusing. But then everything is in this house of mirrors.

At this point, I am reminded of the famous claim that “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. In many places nowadays, academia is entirely about high-stakes money and power. Or more precisely, the transfer of money and power, since academics create neither.

Research funding means overhead and growth, the lifeblood of any academic department. Publications bring prestige. Prestige brings influence. Influence brings your voice to the table, when future ‘grand challenges’ are defined. Startups can even bring personal wealth. Meanwhile, research (the genuine kind), is done by an ever-changing caste of insecure and underpaid ‘trainees’, many exploited due to their visa or economic status.

The thing that confused me during my own inglorious academic career? The hypocritical way this rapacious neoliberal system is coupled to fake do-gooding. It’s trans-Atlantic conference flights, and climate shaming of big corporations. Back-stabbing in private committees, and respectful communications in public. Rape and murder justified by decolonisation theory. It doesn’t really matter what your flaws are, provided that you are ambitious. The pick and mix politics buffet has something you can leverage to get ahead. This is essentially why publications in exclusive journals like Nature are both privately lusted after, and publicly decried.

In fact, academia has always been a heterogeneous tapestry of politics and quality. This anarchy is probably why it works, and probably why much excellent research gets done. Some disciplines, like the industrious electrical engineers, keep their own council. Insulated from the mainstream. On an individual level, most supervisors insist on high standards. So what’s new? My thesis is that we have reached the point where connections between the mediocre yet ambitious span the system, and a current flows. A kind of incompetence percolation limit. As a result, new faiths have sprung up, to replace the old gods of elitism and meritocracy. The humanities are viewed through the prism of social justice. Science is now subservient to sustainable development, real-world applications, and money. Even Nature seems cowed by the new prophets,  constantly running self-flagellating editorials and comment pieces.

The best evidence for such system-level change is the emergence of new kinds of scientific misconduct. Academia will always be vulnerable to black swan events, and individuals like Schön. But the events described here or at Theranos? They took place in plain sight, in university departments, spin-outs, and big teams. We normalised exaggeration and selling, and recruited too many ‘leaders’. The traditional academic gatekeepers prudishly averted their gaze, to avoid seeing the naked Emperor in all his tumescent glory. During the Dias affair, they ignored or attacked the critics. Most of all, they judged them. Judged their status. Judged their opinions. Judged their motivations. ‘Why can’t these dumb schmucks just get with the program?’,  ‘Don’t they read Time Magazine?’, ‘We’re ballin’ here!’.

Moving forward, I think that the big debate is hence between the theory of a few ‘rotten apples’, and outright system failure. Do we respond to the Dias affair with yet another hoop for prospective academics to jump through? Add a research ethics statement to the application package? Or do we remember the dozens (maybe hundreds), of collaborators, reviewers, editors and program managers who supported and promoted his work? On an individual level, all were exonerated by the NSF sponsored investigation at Rochester. That is correct. I am one of them. However, I think that scientists have a collective moral guilt.  A failure to pay more attention to the big picture, to listen to outside voices. To resist the siren calls of money and power. We were credulous, and unquestioning. Never forget how many people failed to understand that, ‘if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably isn’t’.

In conclusion, it is fun to write articles like this. Perhaps you read it is as bravely ‘talking truth to power’. Or perhaps you just thought it was more complaining. But here we all are, and I hope that it at least triggers some reflection or discussion. Most of all, I hope that a few people giggled. It is after all, just physics, and life goes on.

That said, heterodox voices also have a responsibility to propose solutions. How can we stop attracting the wrong people to academia? How can we stop them prospering, and favour transformative research? 

I spent many happy years trying to find out how things worked in the world. Looking for beauty and simplicity. That is ultimately the best motivation for doing research in the hard sciences. Not empire building, or trying to reach some sort of comfortable ‘steady state’, with a constant turnover of papers and students.  What made me leave science was tightly controlled corporate systems. Managing- instead of doing- is now the route to the top. In turn, this has attracted the sickly ambitious [15]. Many of them are scientifically mediocre, or in rare cases, even fraudulent.

My solution? Less prestige, less hierarchy, and more time to think. I propose we slash group sizes, and student numbers. Focus on ability. Make doctoral students independent grant holders, with research freedom. Teach excellent masters degrees, with a taste of research, that lead to industry careers. Reward people who discover things with academic impact. Stop researching demonstrated applications and markets, unless it is fundamental to your field. Encourage industry to re-establish research divisions, and to create good jobs. Challenge the foundational lie that “all science is political”. Break the filaments linking mediocrity and managerialism.

These steps will make an academic career less attractive for some, and less remunerative for others. Some will drift off to their true callings, in used car sales, or real estate.  Maybe we will need new kinds of institutions. But, if the sorry mess described here means anything, it’s that we must smash our bullshit system, and Make Academia Academic Again.

Notes:

[1] Snider, Elliot, Nathan Dasenbrock-Gammon, Raymond McBride, Mathew Debessai, Hiranya Vindana, Kevin Vencatasamy, Keith V. Lawler, Ashkan Salamat, and Ranga P. Dias. "RETRACTED ARTICLE: Room-temperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfur hydride." Nature 586, no. 7829 (2020): 373-377.

[2] Garisto, Dan. "Superconductivity scandal: the inside story of deception in a rising star's physics lab." Nature (2024). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00716-2

[3] Durkee, Dylan, Nathan Dasenbrock-Gammon, G. Alexander Smith, Elliot Snider, Dean Smith, Christian Childs, Simon AJ Kimber, Keith V. Lawler, Ranga P. Dias, and Ashkan Salamat. "Colossal density-driven resistance response in the negative charge transfer insulator MnS₂." Physical Review Letters 127, no. 1 (2021): 016401.

[4] Hirsch, J. E. "On the ac magnetic susceptibility of a room temperature superconductor: anatomy of a probable scientific fraud." Physica C: Superconductivity and its Applications 613 (2023): 1354228.

[5] https://www.pubpeer.com/publications/F342DD2D2E72E5E2FD507089562B94

[6] Schneider, L. “Superconductive witch hunt” https://forbetterscience.com/2024/05/27/superconductive-witch-hunt/

[7] Garisto, Dan. “Plagiarism allegations pursue physicist behind stunning superconductivity claims”, Science (2023). https://www.science.org/content/article/plagiarism-allegations-pursue-physicist-behind-stunning-superconductivity-claims

[8] “High heidyin n: a leader, a person in authority; pl: the authorities” https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12447629.scots-word-of-the-week/

[9]

[10] Caren, Rachel, “University professor sees second paper retracted under accusations of data fabrication”. Rochester Campus Times, (2023) https://www.campustimes.org/2023/07/22/university-professor-sees-second-paper-retracted-under-accusations-of-data-fabrication/

[11] In fact, the author can strongly recommend andouillette, cooked with shallots, mustard and cream. Best washed down with a premier cru Chablis. 

[12]

See also: https://forbetterscience.com/2023/03/29/superconductive-fraud-the-sequel/

[13] De Chant, Tim. “Unearthly Materials claimed to have big-name investors, but they weren’t all on board”, TechCrunch, (2023). https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/17/unearthly-materials-superconductors-investors/

[14] Kim, Minseob, Ranga Dias, Yasuo Ohishi, Takehiro Matsuoka, Jing-Yin Chen, and Choong-Shik Yoo. "Pressure-induced Transformations of Dense Carbonyl Sulfide to Singly Bonded Amorphous Metallic Solid." Scientific reports 6, no. 1 (2016): 31594.

[15] Hans Zoellner, “Management in the Destruction and Repair of Academia - Make Lying Wrong Again!”,

(2024).