From the issue dated August 16, 2002
  Atomic Lies

  By RICHARD MONASTERSKY
 
   With his shoulders hunched and a cigarette in hand, Victor
  Ninov paces the edge of San Francisco Bay. Four miles away and
  600 feet up, his former workplace basks in the morning sun,
  set off amid stands of eucalyptus and pine. The lab in the
  Berkeley Hills occupies a vaunted place in the annals of
  physics, and Mr. Ninov had been a rising star there. But now
  he must view it from a distance, walking through a park built
  on this city's former dump.
 
  Just a short time ago, the nuclear physicist was on his way to
  winning the field's highest honors, as well as putting his
  stamp on the periodic table of the elements. In 1999, he
  co-directed an atom-smashing experiment at the Lawrence
  Berkeley National Laboratory that created two new elements,
  Nos. 118 and 116, the heaviest yet discovered. The result made
  Mr. Ninov a physics sensation. He went on tour, describing the
  experiment in lectures across the United States, Europe, and
  Australia.
 
  The 43-year-old Bulgarian seemed the ideal scientist, says a
  former colleague, Albert Ghiorso, who has co-discovered more
  elements than anyone in history. "Victor could do anything
  mechanically. He knows about electronics down to the finest
  details. He knows all about experimental nuclear physics. He
  knows theoretical aspects of all this. And he's a violinist,"
  says the 87-year-old Mr. Ghiorso.
 
  "He's just a fabulous guy. He has lots of energy and works
  hard."
 
  But Mr. Ninov tumbled on his rise to the top. Other
  laboratories tried and failed to repeat the experiment, and
  even Mr. Ninov's team could not duplicate its own results. To
  great embarrassment, the researchers at Lawrence Berkeley -- a
  federal facility managed by the University of California --
  had to retract the discovery last year. Following an
  investigation, laboratory officials eventually determined that
  Mr. Ninov had faked the data. They quietly fired him in May.
 
  The case has crippled more than just one man's career. It has
  also toppled his research team at Lawrence Berkeley, which
  spawned the entire element-hunting enterprise in the 1930s and
  changed the world forever by discovering plutonium, as well as
  a suite of medical isotopes that help millions of patients
  each year. The scientists there are still reeling.
 
  "The whole group has been in shambles ever since it happened,"
  says Peggy McMahan, research coordinator at the Lawrence
  Berkeley cyclotron where Mr. Ninov conducted his experiments.
 
  At the center of the maelstrom, Mr. Ninov remains an enigmatic
  character who swears that he is innocent and raises the most
  perplexing question of all, one that haunts his colleagues
  across two continents: Why? Why fake a scientific result
  knowing that others would eventually discover the misconduct
  while trying to duplicate the experiment?
 
  'Perfectly Free'
 
  For a man accused of one of the worst types of crime known in
  science, Mr. Ninov laughs easily and often during a walk
  around the Berkeley Marina, where he keeps his 38-foot
  sailboat. Partly out of a love for sailing and also because of
  the high rents in the Bay Area, Mr. Ninov lived aboard his
  cramped boat while working at the laboratory. On weekends, he
  would commute to his house in Stockton, Calif., where his
  wife, Caroline Cox, is a history professor at the University
  of the Pacific.
 
  Mr. Ninov has a slender build, pale-blue eyes, and curly brown
  hair starting to gray at the temples. He is deeply tanned,
  having just returned from a 3,500-mile trip on a friend's
  sailboat that went from San Francisco to the Marquesas
  Islands, in the South Pacific. After 15 years of struggling on
  experiments with little time off for long trips, "I am
  perfectly free. I am enjoying a little bit of a vacation," he
  says in Slavic-tinged English and a voice cured by thousands
  of Camel Lights.
 
  Talking about his past, Mr. Ninov is guarded with dates and
  details, some of which remain painful. While still a boy in
  "the early 1970s," he and his family fled Communist Bulgaria
  and settled in what was then West Germany, moving several
  times. His father subsequently disappeared in the mountains of
  Bulgaria, and his body was found six months later, the
  circumstances of his death unknown.
 
  As an undergraduate and graduate student in Germany, Victor
  Ninov studied physics at the Technical University in
  Darmstadt, and his career began a steep ascent. For his thesis
  and then a postdoctoral fellowship, Mr. Ninov worked at
  Darmstadt's prestigious Institute for Heavy Ion Research,
  known universally as GSI for its German name.
 
  Researchers there had already discovered three new elements,
  Nos. 107 through 109, in the early 1980s, and the wunderkind
  joined the group as it was running confirmation experiments.
 
  In a short time, Mr. Ninov distinguished himself for his
  knowledge of computers and ability to build technical
  instruments. "We thought he had an excellent scientific career
  in front of him," says Sigurd Hofmann, a professor of nuclear
  physics at the University of Frankfurt and leader of the
  heavy-element group at GSI. "He was a very good physicist in
  many different fields of physics." The young scientist also
  impressed others with his cultured interests. An aficionado of
  classical music, he speaks Bulgarian, English, French, German,
  and passable Russian.
 
  Because of his computer skills, Mr. Ninov was given sole
  control over the analysis program in the GSI experiment. He
  would later reprise the role at Lawrence Berkeley, as the only
  member of the team who knew how to run the critical computer
  program. Both groups would come to regret placing him in that
  position.
 
  How to Make an Element
 
  The recipe for cooking up a new element requires a bit of
  atomic magic, something that medieval alchemists spent
  centuries seeking as they strove to transmute lead into gold.
 
  In modern experiments, however, nuclear researchers change
  lead and other relatively ordinary matter into something far
  rarer and dearer than gold.
 
  The instrument that enables such transformations was born here
  in 1931, when Ernest O. Lawrence, for whom the lab is named,
  created a device called a cyclotron, which earned the young
  professor a Nobel Prize eight years later. Lawrence dubbed his
  machine the "proton merry-go-round," an apt term for a device
  that accelerates atomic nuclei by whipping them around in
  circles. Once revved up to high energies, the charged
  particles then fly out of the cyclotron and slam into a target
  of ordinary matter. The magic happens when a projectile
  nucleus hits a target nucleus just right, with so much energy
  that the two fuse, creating a bigger element.
 
  The result is simple arithmetic. Element No. 1, hydrogen, has
  one proton. Uranium has 92. When the two fuse, they produce an
  artificial element with 93 protons, hence an atomic number of
  93.
 
  In 1940, Lawrence's lab -- then part of the University of
  California at Berkeley -- used a cyclotron to create that very
  element and the next one, which they named neptunium and
  plutonium. Over the next 40 years, researchers here discovered
  12 more elements, more than any other institution.
 
  By the 1980s, though, the laboratory's once-brilliant luster
  had dulled. The science that Lawrence started had grown, and
  so had the accelerators, reaching a scale that couldn't fit
  easily into the Berkeley Hills.
 
  The United States chose to build its premier facility, the
  Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in flat fields west of
  Chicago, where its main accelerator is 1.3 miles across. Other
  big accelerators sprang up near Stanford University and at
  Brookhaven National Laboratory, in New York. Meanwhile, the
  California city that had helped launch the atomic age became a
  nuclear-free zone, and activists here began to hamper the
  lab's efforts to conduct experiments with significant amounts
  of radiation.
 
  As the 1990s began, the Department of Energy and other federal
  agencies were financing Lawrence Berkeley primarily to do work
  in materials science, biology, nuclear medicine, and other
  applied fields, with relatively little going toward nuclear
  physics. GSI, in Germany, had taken a leading role in making
  elements, as had a group at the Joint Institute for Nuclear
  Research, in Dubna, Russia. At Berkeley, the element hunters
  contented themselves to work with a cyclotron built in 1961.
  The device's control room has such aged light bulbs, meters,
  and dials that students say it looks like the set of the
  original Star Trek.
 
  Island of Stability
 
  Despite its difficulties, Lawrence Berkeley was still one of
  the top three labs in the world for making new elements. All
  three competitors were eagerly seeking the prized "island of
  stability," atoms with special combinations of protons and
  neutrons that persist for a long time -- seconds, weeks,
  possibly millennia -- before falling apart.
 
  With such relatively long half-lives, those isotopes could
  prove useful in treating cancer, creating medical diagnostic
  procedures, or even producing nuclear weapons.
 
  In 1996, Lawrence Berkeley hired Mr. Ninov, by now a
  world-class expert, as part of an effort to search for that
  fabled island of stability. The team specifically wanted help
  building an instrument, called a gas-filled separator, that
  Mr. Ninov had constructed in Germany.
 
  Once settled here, he joined a nuclear chemist named Kenneth
  E. Gregorich on the project. Tall and bald, with deep-set eyes
  and a prominent nose, Mr. Gregorich had practically grown up
  at the lab, having done his doctoral work under Glenn T.
  Seaborg, the Nobel-winning chemist who co-discovered plutonium
  and nine other elements here. Mr. Gregorich worked with Mr.
  Ninov every day for five years. When he describes their work,
  he wears the pained expression of a man whose spouse has
  cheated on him.
 
  The colleagues spent their first two years piecing together
  the separator, which sits in a bunkerlike room that adjoins
  the massive cyclotron. The cyclotron itself remains walled
  off, hidden behind six feet of concrete and battleship steel
  to protect researchers from the deadly neutrons generated
  inside. A series of pipes from the cyclotron funnels a
  trillion nuclei a second into a target and then through the
  gas-filled separator.
 
  At the lab, the Berkeley Gas Separator goes by the initials
  BGS, and it does exactly what its name implies. As the
  cyclotron beam hits the target, billions of particles fly
  right through without touching anything and billions more
  barely graze the target atoms or collide in unwanted ways.
 
  "This is a big machine to get rid of all the garbage and send
  only the interesting atoms to the detectors," says Mr.
  Gregorich.
 
  The machine turned out to be a Frankenstein, constructed from
  scavenged parts. Lawrence Berkeley couldn't make the lead
  targets for its first experiment, so the team borrowed them
  from GSI, as well as detectors and the same data-analysis
  program that Mr. Ninov had used in finding Elements 110 and
  112. He jokes that whenever people traveled from Darmstadt to
  Berkeley, they packed parts for the separator in their
  luggage.
 
  When he and Mr. Gregorich were finishing the device, in 1999,
  they planned to go slowly, running a range of experiments to
  test the separator, improve its performance, and ready it for
  more-important work.
 
  But a theorist stepped in and waylaid those careful plans.
  Robert Smolanczuk, a Fulbright fellow at Lawrence Berkeley
  from the Soltan Institute for Nuclear Studies, in Warsaw, had
  made some wild calculations about superheavy elements.
 
  In all the work done to that point, researchers had found it
  progressively tougher to produce bigger elements by fusing a
  projectile and a target. For each step upward in atomic
  number, the chances of the two fusing dropped considerably,
  meaning that an experiment would have to run for longer at
  higher energies in order to create the desired element.
 
  Mr. Smolanczuk's calculations, however, suggested that Element
  118 would be relatively easy to fashion by bombarding Element
  82, lead, with Element 36, krypton. As fathers of the new
  separator, Mr. Ninov and Mr. Gregorich didn't want to push
  their progeny too fast, but other team members persuaded them
  to test Mr. Smolanczuk's theory. So they bypassed all their
  plans and aimed straight for Element 118 when they had some
  precious "beam time," in April 1999. With several different
  groups vying to use the accelerator, Mr. Ninov and Mr.
  Gregorich had only limited access to the cyclotron beam.
 
  Neither scientist believed Mr. Smolanczuk's theory. "We didn't
  know how many orders of magnitude he was wrong," recalls Mr.
  Ninov, "but we said, 'OK, we can measure at least to a certain
  level.' Of course, we didn't expect to see anything at that
  time, and then suddenly it happened."
 
  'An Event'
 
  That it was "an event," in the lingo of the lab. Mr. Ninov,
  who was analyzing the data, says he saw signs that an atom had
  hit the detector and had immediately shed a string of six
  alpha particles -- nuclei containing two protons and two
  neutrons -- all in the same location. That decay chain was
  exactly what the researchers were seeking but had not expected
  to find: Element 118 lodging itself in the detector, then
  decaying to Element 116 by giving off two protons, then to
  Element 114, and so on down the line. In one instant, the team
  had apparently discovered two new elements, 118 and 116.
 
  Mr. Ninov was the only one who knew about the data, and at
  first he questioned the results, he recalls. "This was our
  maiden voyage. I wasn't confident that our programs were
  debugged, that our electronics were perfectly debugged, that
  the separator was perfectly debugged."
 
  Soon Mr. Ninov's analyses revealed another event, and he told
  Mr. Ghiorso, the most experienced member of the team. But the
  younger scientist said nothing to his other colleagues for two
  days, a fact that struck Mr. Ghiorso as particularly odd. "I
  felt I had to keep it to myself because it was up to him. Why
  did he pick me out to tell?" Mr. Ghiorso wonders now. That's
  how many people at the lab speak today, questioning every
  detail of what happened, looking for clues to explain Mr.
  Ninov's actions.
 
  Because of his previous work in Germany, Mr. Ninov played a
  pivotal role in the Lawrence Berkeley experiments. He was the
  only one to deal with the original data, which came from the
  detectors in binary form and were stored on magnetic tape. Mr.
  Ninov ran a computer-analysis program that converted the
  binary files into text files of words and numbers for the rest
  of the team to interpret. In 1999, no one else knew how to use
  that program, so they relied on Mr. Ninov to supply the
  results.
 
  When the physicist eventually showed the team his analysis of
  the data, everyone reacted with shock. The group still wasn't
  sure it had a real detection, so it examined Mr. Ninov's
  results several times. "It's always a nightmare in the
  heavy-element research, when you're picking a stick out of the
  hay," says Mr. Ninov. "You're thinking you've thought about
  everything, but there is for sure something you didn't think
  about."
 
  As always in cutting-edge science, the researchers worried
  that competitors might beat them to the discovery. Three
  months earlier, Dubna had reported producing Element 114,
  which fit squarely in the island of stability, with a
  half-life of 30 seconds. GSI was certainly capable of doing
  the same krypton-and-lead experiment. After all, it had
  provided many of the parts for the gas separator.
 
  Nonetheless, the Lawrence Berkeley team played it cautiously,
  choosing to run the experiment again after improving the
  separator. Using beam time scheduled for a different study,
  the researchers tried the 118 experiment once more. Mr.
  Ninov's analysis revealed another event that was not
  spectacular but was enough to convince them that they had a
  real, reproducible discovery.
 
  What's more, the decay sequence agreed particularly well with
  Mr. Smolanczuk's calculations. The concordance of theory and
  experiment, Mr. Ghiorso recalls, led Mr. Ninov to exclaim,
  "Robert must talk to God."
 
  The researchers quickly wrote up their findings and submitted
  them to Physical Review Letters, the field's premier journal.
  Their paper, "Observation of Superheavy Nuclei Produced in the
  Reaction of 86Kr with 208Pb," appeared in the August 9, 1999,
  issue.
 
  After decades of losing out to other labs, the element hunters
  at Lawrence Berkeley again made headlines. "Berkeley Crew Bags
  Element 118," proclaimed Science magazine. "Team Adds 2
  Elusive Elements to the Periodic Table," reported The New York
  Times.
 
  Mr. Ninov enjoyed the fruits of the success, says Mr. Hofmann,
  the leader of the GSI group and Mr. Ninov's former colleague.
  "Victor became very famous that year. He was invited to many
  talks. There was much excitement. We immediately started to
  repeat this experiment in the summer of 1999."
 
  Critical Mass of Questions
 
  That's when the troubles started. In three weeks of time on
  its own cyclotron, the GSI team did not detect any events of
  118. Nor did groups in France or Japan. The laboratories all
  have different setups, so Mr. Hofmann, Mr. Gregorich, and Mr.
  Ninov agreed that the best approach would be to repeat the
  experiment at Lawrence Berkeley, and the team did so in 2000.
  Again, nothing appeared.
 
  The researchers thought that statistical variations might
  explain the discrepancy: Shooting a beam at a target is a
  random process, much like dealing a shuffled deck of cards. So
  a few atoms of 118 might appear in one experiment and then
  none in another, just as a poker player might rarely end up
  with all the aces in his hand, purely by chance.
 
  But Lawrence Berkeley officials were growing nervous. Perhaps
  a computer program had played tricks on the research team, or
  some other problem had escaped its attention. I-Yang Lee, head
  of low-energy research on the cyclotron, set up a committee of
  three staff members to investigate, and they made several
  recommendations to improve on the original experiment. One
  suggestion was to have several people independently analyze
  the raw data.
 
  In April 2001, Mr. Gregorich and Mr. Ninov again got some beam
  time to retry the experiment. At first, it seemed a success.
  Mr. Ninov reported that the detector had picked up a decay
  chain for 118.
 
  But the hope soon evaporated. Another team member, Walter
  Loveland, a professor of chemistry at Oregon State University,
  analyzed the new data and found no evidence of an event.
  Several other people, including Mr. Ninov, also tried and
  struck out.
 
  In the meantime, some of the researchers finally looked back
  at the 1999 experiment. They were shocked to find that there
  were no events in the original data file.
 
  It seemed there had never been any evidence for the element.
 
  No one could make sense of the situation. The three events
  were in the processed text file that several researchers had
  examined, but not in the original binary one.
 
  Most of the scientists figured that a bug in the processing
  program had somehow escaped Mr. Ninov's attention and created
  the illusion of an event. Mr. Gregorich and his colleagues
  issued a press release and told researchers at other
  laboratories to disregard the claim for 118. At the same time,
  the team submitted a letter to Physical Review Letters in July
  2001 retracting its original finding.
 
  In one short paragraph that offered few details, the letter
  stated simply that the experiment had not detected Element 118
  in 1999. To the rest of the world, the whole affair looked
  like a simple mistake.
 
  But there was much more going on behind the scenes. Mr. Ninov
  stood by the original finding and refused to sign the
  retraction letter, delaying its publication until this past
  July. Meanwhile, the laboratory appointed a second internal
  committee -- made up of computer experts -- to look into the
  discrepancy. That group determined that there was nothing
  wrong with the analysis program. The only plausible theory was
  that someone had inserted false data into the text file, and
  Mr. Ninov was the only person to have worked with the original
  data.
 
  The lab placed Mr. Ninov on leave with pay in November 2001,
  while a committee led by Rochus E. Vogt, a professor of
  physics emeritus at the California Institute of Technology,
  investigated the matter. The committee issued its confidential
  report in late March, and the lab fired Mr. Ninov in May.
 
  Only on June 25 did the laboratory's director, Charles V.
  Shank, tell all employees about the scientific fraud that the
  review committee determined had taken place. He declined to
  name the perpetrator, because Mr. Ninov had filed a grievance
  against the lab for unfair dismissal. Mr. Shank also
  criticized Mr. Gregorich's team for failing to make the most
  elementary checks on the data.
 
  Missing Elements
 
  Meanwhile, more pieces of the puzzle were emerging across the
  Atlantic at GSI. In December 2001, Mr. Hofmann and his
  colleagues went back to their original data tapes from 1996
  while writing up a paper on Element 112. The experiment that
  year had identified two decay chains from Element 112, but the
  GSI team could find only the second one in the binary file.
  The first one was missing. It appeared only in the text file
  that Mr. Ninov had produced from the primary data.
 
  The German scientists then examined every decay chain recorded
  from 1994 to 1996. They found one more false event -- the
  second sighting of Element 110, recorded in November 1994.
 
  Mr. Hofmann says the evidence points squarely at Mr. Ninov.
  "He was the only one who was in charge. I got the data from
  him personally in a printed version on paper, which I still
  have in my folders. And if somebody else had manipulated these
  data, he certainly would have realized that they were not his
  data files."
 
  The evidence, however, doesn't explain why a promising
  scientist would decide to fabricate data. "This is completely
  not understandable," says Mr. Hofmann. "Especially in our
  case. For 110, we already had one decay chain. In 112, he
  faked the first decay chain, but we measured another good one.
  He could be honest. There was no need to keep this wrong decay
  chain. We could only explain it as a bad joke. From our
  results, it was completely useless to fake data because there
  were good ones."
 
  At Berkeley, researchers are similarly perplexed. They say Mr.
  Ninov must have known that he would get caught eventually,
  when other labs tried to duplicate the finding. "It's
  unbelievable that anyone would do this sort of thing," says
  Mr. Lee. "There was absolutely no need for him to do this," he
  adds, noting that Mr. Ninov already had made prominent
  discoveries. "His career did not depend on this."
 
  Maybe not his career, but possibly the success of the
  experiment. Mr. Ghiorso wonders whether Mr. Ninov was buying
  time for the team, inserting false events so that the lab
  would let the experiment run longer and provide the
  opportunity to catch some real decay chains. "I'm just
  speculating," says Mr. Ghiorso, "that he 'knew' that we would
  find it sooner or later, just as they had in Germany. He was
  just anticipating, knowing that it would be confirmed," which
  never happened.
 
  For his part, Mr. Ninov maintains his innocence. "I'm the
  scapegoat. I don't accept the accusation of fabricating the
  data," he says, arguing that the charges don't add up.
  "They're saying I'm smart enough to run a complicated
  experiment, but I'm dumb enough not to fake data properly. And
  then there's the lack of motivation. Why shall I ruin my life
  for two or three events? It's simply not worth it."
 
  One possibility, he says, is that he was set up to hide an
  unintentional error by the team. Suppose some stray bit of
  electronic noise had confused the computer program by
  masquerading as a real decay chain. If that's the case,
  somebody discovered the error long after the team had made its
  stunning claim and then felt embarrassed enough to make the
  mistake look like fraud.
 
  To do that, the person must have gone into the original binary
  files to remove the faulty data that had fooled everyone.
  Without offering any names, he hints that somebody altered the
  files to focus suspicion on him. The perpetrator must then
  have pulled the same stunt in the German data files to
  solidify the case. "I do know people that are affiliated with
  LBL as well as at the GSI," says Mr. Ninov.
 
  The investigators assembled by Lawrence Berkeley, however,
  rejected Mr. Ninov's theory because it doesn't accord with the
  dates and times of key computer files. What's more, he was the
  only team member who knew how to use the data-analysis
  program. "We find clear and convincing evidence that Victor
  Ninov was responsible for the fabrication and that he engaged
  in scientific misconduct," the group concluded in its report,
  released this month.
 
  Mr. Ninov says he is now trying to move on. Standing at the
  marina in Berkeley, looking out toward the Pacific Ocean, he
  says, "I don't have the financial means to go to court. And
  another thing, since last year was not one of my pleasant
  ones, I would rather regroup everything and start from scratch
  than continue living with the permanent psychological
  pressure."
 
  In some ways, he seems better off than the colleagues he left
  behind. The affair "killed the superheavy-element program at
  Berkeley, period. Nobody is going to do it," says Mr. Ghiorso,
  whom the team had considered honoring by naming Element 118
  "Ghiorsium." Others at the lab don't accept such a dire
  prediction, but they admit that they have a difficult path
  ahead.
 
  The group caught some harsh criticism over the affair, and Mr.
  Gregorich is still irate that the laboratory director chided
  his team for failing to check critical data. "That's just
  wrong," he says. "There were plenty of checks. That statement
  pissed me off."
 
  Perhaps somebody should have been analyzing the data alongside
  Mr. Ninov. But when that is suggested to Mr. Gregorich, he
  replies angrily, "I had a world-recognized expert that we
  hired and was doing that job."
 
  Laboratory officials maintain that several people should have
  been involved in the essential step of data analysis, but
  other scientists say even that safeguard cannot always thwart
  fraud.
 
  At some point, scientific researchers have to trust their
  colleagues, says Denis L. Rousseau, who has investigated
  several cases of fraud and self-deception in science. A
  professor and chairman of the department of physiology and
  biophysics at Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of
  Medicine, Mr. Rousseau says that "in science, we always depend
  on the integrity of our co-workers. When that breaks down,
  it's very difficult to correct for that."
 
  The system has a built-in protection, however, in the
  fundamental rule that investigators must try to reproduce
  interesting findings. "It isn't sexy," says Oregon State's Mr.
  Loveland. "Some people have said that repeating other peoples'
  experiments is like kissing your sister. But it's a necessary
  thing to do, not just for catching cases of fraud but for
  genuine mistakes."
 
  And that, for the near term, may be the future of the Lawrence
  Berkeley team: confirming and extending other labs'
  blockbuster findings. Mr. Gregorich is trying to gear up to
  make a run for Element 114, which only the Dubna lab, in
  Russia, has seen thus far.
 
  The same group has also reported hints of Elements 116 and,
  recently, 118. If the Lawrence Berkeley team can reproduce
  those experiments, it may come as a form of vindication, to
  finally create the elusive element that sparked so much
  heartache.
 
  THE ABBREVIATED LIFE OF ELEMENT 118
 
  April-May 1999: In an experiment at the Lawrence Berkeley
  National Laboratory, Victor Ninov reports making three good
  sightings of Element 118 along with Element 116, both never
  before seen.
 
  April-May 1999: In an experiment at the Lawrence Berkeley
  National Laboratory, Victor Ninov reports making three good
  sightings of Element 118 along with Element 116, both never
  before seen.
 
  April-May 2001: In a third experiment at Lawrence Berkeley,
  Mr. Ninov initially reports finding one case of 118. That
  sighting is dismissed by other researchers and eventually by
  Mr. Ninov himself in subsequent analyses.
 
  June 2001: A Lawrence Berkeley committee determines that all
  reported sightings of the element were incorrect. The lab
  investigates the cause of the error, at first focusing on the
  possibility of computer problems, which are subsequently ruled
  out.
 
  November 2001: Lawrence Berkeley puts Mr. Ninov on leave with
  pay as it investigates whether he falsified the Element 118
  data.
 
  December 2001: A team at the Institute for Heavy Ion Research
  in Darmstadt, Germany, checks data collected in 1994 through
  1996, when it discovered Elements 110, 111, and 112. The team
  discovers that one sighting of Element 110 and one of Element
  112 were fabricated, but that the rest were real. Mr. Ninov
  was in charge of data analysis for those experiments.
 
  March 2002: A committee at Lawrence Berkeley determines that
  Mr. Ninov committed misconduct by making up data. Mr. Ninov
  denies that he fabricated the data.
 
  May 2002: Lawrence Berkeley fires Mr. Ninov.
 
  SOURCE: Chronicle reporting

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