Compilation: Du Shanni, Liu Jiajia, Sun Tao
Ranga Dias苦心经营的室温超导"幻境"终告破灭。
Following the publication of an investigative report on his fraud scandal in March, Nature published a lengthy article on April 6 detailing the details of the University of Rochester's official investigation into his misconduct allegations.
The 124-page official report shows that Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester in the United States, is suspected of data falsification, falsification and plagiarism.
The official investigation, which lasted 10 months and was conducted by a team of independent scientists recruited by the University of Rochester, was completed on Feb. 8. The investigative team reviewed 16 allegations against Dias and concluded that in each case, he was likely guilty of academic misconduct.
Dias holds tenure at the University of Rochester. Currently, the school is trying to fire him before the end of the Dias contract for the 2024-2025 school year.
Ranga Dias。 图源：罗切斯特大学官网
Screenshot of the cover of the 124-page survey report. Source: Survey report
Three investigations were fruitless
The investigative report, which summarizes Dias's fraudulent activities during his academic career, includes two of his previous studies on room-temperature superconductivity published in Nature, as well as two other papers published in Chemical Communications and Physical Review Letter (PRL). These articles were all retracted.
The University of Rochester's filings with the court show that the investigation was conducted at the request of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
NSF, the nation's leading funding agency for academic research, awarded the Dias Teacher Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award in 2021 for $790,000.
It is important to note that this NSF-backed investigation is not the first time that the University of Rochester has investigated possible problems with the Dias lab. Between 2021 and 2022, the university conducted three preliminary investigations into Dias's paper on carbon-sulfide hydride (CSH) room-temperature superconductivity published in Nature, but all of them ended in Dias's victory.
CSH室温超导论文。 图源Nature论文
The first investigation was launched after a complaint by Jorge Hirsch, a condensed matter theorist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), filed a complaint. Hirsch claims that there are problems with the paper's magnetic susceptibility data, which are critical to Dias's conclusion on CSH room-temperature superconductors.
The University of Rochester questioned three unnamed internal examiners, and Dias contacted an external examiner to review Hirsch's claims. The information in the report indicates that the external reviewer is Maddury Somayazulu, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, USA. However, Somayazulu was a collaborator on Dias's paper. The investigation concluded on January 19, 2022, that "there is no credible evidence warranting further investigation into the matter." ”
The second investigation was launched in January 2022 by Dirk van der Marel, editor-in-chief of the superconductivity research journal Physica C. Another examiner accepted the case and concluded on April 6 of the same year that no formal investigation was necessary. The work was then verified by a second examiner, who appeared to be Russell Hemley, a physicist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, according to the investigation report.
Like Somayazulu, examiner Hemley has collaborated with Dias on a number of papers, including a study on the characteristics of CSH, according to the University of Rochester investigation.
It is not easy to understand why such a significant conflict of interest can become an examiner.
A spokesperson for Argonne National Laboratory denied Somayazulu's status as an examiner, but did not respond when asked why the footnotes in the investigation mentioned "Somayazulu_Review of NSF 2020 (CSH) Paper." Hemley did not clarify whether he acted as an examiner.
Nature's journal team investigated the CSH paper through its independent reviewers, and two of the reviewers found evidence that the magnetic susceptibility data may have been fabricated. When the journal said it would retract the CSH paper and respond to another complaint from Hirsch, the University of Rochester conducted a third investigation.
The investigation was conducted by the same anonymous examiner who conducted the second survey. Although Nature's findings were available, the reviewer concluded on 19 October 2022 that any oddities in the data could be attributed to the way they were processed and that no investigation was required.
Skynet is magnificent, negligent but not leaky
In October 2022, James Hamlin, a physicist at the University of Florida in the United States, submitted concerns about Dias's work to NSF.
The University of Rochester has assembled a committee of 3 physicists to ensure the credibility of this investigation. They are Marius Millot and Peter Celliers of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States and Marcus Knudison of Sandia National Laboratory in the United States.
Nature's news team invited several superconductivity researchers to review the report. At first, they were concerned about the choice of members appointed by the university: on the one hand, the three physicists were experts in shock wave physics rather than superconducting physics, and Millot and Celliers co-authored a review paper of 27 authors published earlier this year with Dias.
However, this concern dispelled when the researchers read the report. Brad Ramshaw, a physicist at Cornell University, said, "They have made a huge sacrifice of time for this, and the entire academic community should be grateful that we have such colleagues who are willing to give so much." ”
The three investigators did not comment. The Commission of Inquiry kept records of their work, including data on computer hard drives, e-mails, and physical notebooks. They also interviewed 10 people involved in the case, including Dias and some of his former students, and held at least 50 meetings to discuss them.
Notably, the researchers confirmed that Dias falsified magnetic susceptibility data in the CSH paper.
The report shows that first of all, Dias falsified the CSH data and published it. When the data source came under scrutiny, Dias and his collaborator and co-author, Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), released a set of fabricated raw data.
Doubts arose about the discrepancies between the raw and published data, leading Dias to claim that a sophisticated approach to data processing was used on the published data, which focused critics' attention on data processing techniques rather than raw data, providing a "plausible illusion."
Facts revealed
According to the investigative report, Dias had repeatedly promised to provide raw data, but never delivered. In response to the findings, he wrote: "The absence of certain raw data files does not mean that they do not exist, nor does it indicate that I have any wrongdoing. ”
Dias has on several occasions deliberately misled team members and collaborators about the source of the data. He had told his partners at UNLV that the measurements were taken at the University of Rochester, but turned around and told the researchers at the University of Rochester that the measurements were taken at the UNLV, the report showed.
Comparison of data for manganese disulfide and germanium tetraselenide. Photo credit: James Hamlin
Dias also lied to the journal. PRL's retracted paper, a study on the electrical properties of manganese disulfide (MnS2), was censored by the journal as having obvious data fabrication, and he provided the journal reviewer with the fabricated data instead of the original data, and was also deemed by PRL to be "deliberately obstructing the review". Investigators commissioned by the University of Rochester confirmed the journal's findings, and Dias used the resistance data of germanium tetraselenide from his doctoral dissertation for the study of manganese disulfide, a material with completely different properties. When questioned about this by investigators, Dias sent them the same fabricated data that was sent to PRL.
Nowhere is this clearest in the results of the Lutetium Hydrogen Nitrogen Compounds (LuH) paper, how exactly does Dias tamper with the data? Dias's former students helped the investigative committee find the raw data on the lab's hard drive. Based on the raw data, Dias often selectively omitted data "to mask erratic drops and jumps in the resistance data, the presence of which would undermine the claims of LuH's superconducting behavior," the commission of inquiry wrote.
The commission of inquiry found that on August 27, 2022, co-author Sachith Dissanayake, who was working with Dias at the University of Rochester at the time, warned Dias that the research data had been improperly tampered with, but the latter ignored it. In response to the investigation report, he claimed that Dissanayake misinterpreted the data.
And this tampered data is the key to the acceptance of the LuH paper.
Case closing
On December 22, 2023, the Commission of Inquiry sent a draft investigation report to Dias, who slammed the investigators for their expertise and integrity. He claimed that investigators' methods "can sometimes be seen in the realm of conspiracy theories" and that "they lack a strong logical basis." Dias also claimed that Salamat persuaded Dias's former students to oppose him and sent a letter to Nature requesting that LuH's research paper be retracted. However, the opposite is true, as Nature's journalism team has previously reported that it was the students who sent the report and retraction request letters.
In its response, Dias did not provide the original data requested by the Committee. In their final report, investigators responded to Dias's allegations, saying that explanations for the omission of their data did not change the commission of inquiry's reasoning or findings.
Ultimately, the committee found that the Rochester students and Dissanayake were not the culprits, but the victims. The Commission did not have access to UNLV resources to clear the designations of the researchers, including Salamat, but found that the individuals had also been deceived and found no "substantial evidence of misconduct" against them.
The Commission of Inquiry recommended that Dias should not be allowed to continue teaching or engage in publicly or privately funded research. "The evidence found in this investigation suggests that Dias is not credible," they added.
Related Links:
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00976-y
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00716-2
https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/2021-nsf-career-award-recipients-research-projects-475212/
https://www.hajim.rochester.edu/me/people/faculty/dias-ranga/index.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2801-z