TRAGEDY is the only word that adequately describes the four years that Henrik Sch枚n spent at Bell Labs in New Jersey. Here was a young man on a roll in one of the world’s most prestigious labs. The discovery of a novel way to inject electric charge into organic crystals enabled him to turn insulators into conductors and raise the temperature at which buckyballs superconduct by more than 100 掳C. He went on to create transistors out of a single molecules. Everything he touched turned to gold.
Until last week, that is, when an independent panel employed by Bell…
