Back in 2001, while Henrik Schoen was busy fiddling his lab results at Bell Labs, Robert Papalia was up to something similar at Nano World Projects Corp, a company whose business was âthe development and commercial exploitation of nanotechnology.â
While Schoen was pilloried by the scientific establishment, perhaps to deflect any criticism of the publishers who were only too happy to publish his results without making particularly stringent checks, Papilla has been fines 75,000 Canadian dollars and banned from market activities for 25 years.
The moral of these two tales, if there is one, is that both the markets and the scientific community have their own functioning, albeit flawed, systems of checks and balances, but while Papalia is free to pursue other areas of business, Schoen was effectively banned for life.