Elements 116 and 118 are Fabricated?

At a speech to employees last month, the lab's director, Charles Shank, said the supposedly landmark discovery of elements 118 and 116 was the result of scientific misconduct by one individual of a 15-member team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Lab officials last year retracted the announcement of the discovery after the research team and other scientists were unable to duplicate the results, but the allegation of scientific misconduct is only now becoming public.

Shank's comments are detailed in the lab's official newsletter.

The individual singled out by Shank, but not identified by him, was identified by several newspapers as fired physicist Victor Ninov.

Ninov was suspended by the lab in November, later fired and has a grievance pending regarding his dismissal. There was no phone number listed in California for Ninov, and calls to the lab's spokesman seeking further comment were not immediately returned.

The announcement that scientists had discovered the two elements appeared in the June 1999 edition of the journal Physical Review of Letters. A proposed retraction was submitted to the journal last year.

Prior to the scrutiny of the discovery, the Lawrence Berkeley lab team said its work confirmed theories that began to circulate among physicists some 30 years ago about an "island of stability" for nuclei with approximately 114 protons and 184 neutrons.

In the original experiment, lead targets were bombarded with beams of high-energy krypton ions. The sequence of decay events for elements 118 and 116, if detected, would be consistent with theories of an "island of stability" for nuclei.

Shank lauded his own department for ferreting out the fraud.

"There is nothing more important for a laboratory than scientific integrity," Shank told lab employees. "Only with such integrity will the public, which funds our work, have confidence in us."

The heavy element research fraud is a stinging embarrassment for the lab. Shank admitted that basic verifications necessary for such lofty scientific proclamations were not followed.

"In this case, the most elementary checks and data archiving were not done," Shanks said.

The Original Story from: yahoo