Sir

Your News Feature (Nature 418, 120–121; 2002) seems to try to shift the blame for the “Schön affair” to the scientific community. We have followed this work since the first publications. The answer to your question of whether we are ready to police ourselves is simple. The scientific system is working. Physical scientists do police themselves: not only is the scientific community ready to “tackle the issue of misconduct”, it has already done so.

Problems with the Bell Labs data (see Nature 417, 789; 2002) were uncovered by physical scientists asking tough questions months before journalists got a hint of them. The impression left by your article, that we were taken for a ride, could not be farther from the truth. Journalists have blown things out of proportion, while scientists were trying to reproduce results.

It is not easy to identify such problems and it takes time for the system to kick in. The results Schön et al. presented were not unreasonable: several groups have observed similar (although much smaller) effects over more than 20 years. It is still not clear whether there has been any fraud; the possibility exists, however unlikely, of an experimental mistake. This will eventually be settled by the investigating committee.

Natural science has a self-regulating system that has evolved over centuries. Sooner or later the true facts about claimed physics phenomena are revealed by a worldwide iteration process by diverse research teams. This system works.