I wrote here about some of the controversy around the superconductor discovery claims from the lab of Ranga Dias at Rochester, and the story has not taken any positive turns since I did that post. It is widely believed that the various papers on this subject from that lab are not reproducible, and there have been several retractions so far. This piece at Nature will give you the details about that, and about how things got to this point.
How things got to this point was, it seems, a principal investigator steamrolling his own grad students and postdocs, hiding key details and pressuring everyone to get papers out no matter what misgivings they might be feeling.
By the time the CSH paper came under scrutiny by Nature journal editors in early 2022, Dias’s graduate students were starting to grow concerned. In summer 2021, Dias had tasked them with investigating a compound of lutetium and hydrogen (LuH), which he thought might be a high-temperature superconductor.
They began testing commercially purchased samples of LuH and, before long, a student measured the resistance dropping to zero at a temperature of around 300 K (27 °C). Dias concluded the material was a room-temperature superconductor, even though there was extremely little evidence, several students told Nature. “Ranga was convinced,” one student says. . .
But the measurements were plagued by systematic errors, which students say they shared with Dias. “I was very, very concerned that one of the probes touching the sample was broken,” one student says. “We could be measuring something that looks like a superconducting drop, but be fooling ourselves.” Although students did see resistance drops in a few other samples, there was no consistency across samples, or even for repeated measurements of a single sample, they told Nature’s news team.
Students were also worried about the accuracy of other measurements. During elemental analysis of a sample, they detected trace amounts of nitrogen. Dias concluded that the samples included the element — and the resulting paper refers to nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride. But further analysis, performed after the paper was submitted, indicated that nitrogen was not incorporated into the LuH. “Ranga ignored what I was saying,” one student says.
Because they were not consulted on the CSH paper, the students say they wanted to make sure they were included in the process of writing the LuH paper. According to the students, Dias initially agreed to involve them. “Then, one day, he sends us an e-mail and says, ‘Here’s the paper. I’m gonna submit it,’” one student says.
As a graduate student, it's a painful process to come to doubt the integrity of the work coming from inside your own group, and especially to start to question the behavior of the professor running the whole effort. You really, really don't want this to be true on either a personal or a professional level, so there are definitely intellectual and emotional barriers that can keep you from coming to such conclusions. You're at the very beginning of your career as a scientist, and you can't help but be overwhelmed by feelings that said career might be getting derailed right at the start through no real fault of your own.
Graduate students are in a particularly vulnerable position here. Different research groups run in different ways, but in almost all of them, the PI's word is at some point equivalent to law. If the professor says "I'm sending in the manuscript" or "I'm taking you off this project", there is very little recourse because of the huge asymmetry of power involved. In many departments there is some theoretical degree of oversight from the department as a whole or the graduate studies office itself, but my impression is that in practice these things are not very effective. For the most part, universities let professors run their research groups in the way that they see fit to, and there's a huge institutional energy barrier to doing anything about it from the outside.
That certainly seems to have been the case at Rochester. As you'll see by reading that article, the university managed to run three separate investigations into the Dias lab and its publications without managing to come to any conclusions of misconduct. That's impressive. The students who spoke (anonymously) to the Nature reporters say that they were never contacted during any of these efforts and were not even aware that some of them were taking place at all. Universities as well are very reluctant to face the facts in these situations, for their own reasons. A fourth investigation, which (finally) brought in outside experts, seems to have resulted in Dias being stripped of his students and his lab space.
The refereeing process for the papers that did get published comes in for some scrutiny as well. There seem to have been very well-founded reasons to doubt the data in the Dias papers, which showed statistical signs of fabrication, but somehow this stuff got published anyway. The Nature article, in the end, is not quite able to explain why Nature published the second Dias paper after the first one had come under fire and after it seems that the great majority of the reviewer reports flagged serious problems with it. Not too many people come out of this story looking good.
The story gets ugly indeed when the students start recording their meetings with Dias, recordings that show that he was trying to manipulate them about the details of Nature's post-publication concerns about the paper. His phrase "We can pretend we’re going to cooperate and buy time for a month or so" is particularly striking, especially as he was removing the dates from the Nature correspondence that he was showing them. In the end, it was the graduate student co-authors who formally requested that the paper be retracted, with Dias himself trying to block them with cease-and-desist paperwork.
I really have to take my hat off to the students involved. This was (is) a horrible situation, and it took a great deal of courage for them to extricate themselves from it. But it should go without saying that things never should have come to this. Of course, Dias himself should not have tried to build a career out of faked data - that should go without saying. But there are always going to be such people, and the question is how far they're going to get before being found out (and how many other lives they're going to mess with before that happens). Rochester's three ineffectual investigations should serve as a strong warning to other institutions and departments. Too often, the purpose of such things seems to be to make the problem go away rather than to find out what is actually happening. Graduate students - human beings in general - shouldn't be treated like this.