How it feels to be plagiarized
I became an independent scientist in 1996, having barely survived the interview process for faculty positions. I had decided to develop and apply high spatial and temporal resolution optical probes to the study of ferroelectric materials.
A pivotal moment in my career took place on November 8, 1999. I attended Peter Shor’s Dickson Prize lecture on Quantum Computing at Carnegie Mellon University. Most of Shor’s lecture concerned his famous algorithm, which went straight into one of my ears and out the other. I perked up toward the end of his talk when Shor mentioned a proposal to build a quantum computer out of spins in silicon. Bruce Kane, working in Australia at the time, conceptualized a way for silicon — our mainstay material of the First Quantum Revolution — to succeed yet again in the quantum realm. Now known as the “Kane quantum computer”, Kane showed how the DiVincenzo criteria might be satisfied. Twenty five years later, Kane’s revolutionary ideas are being realized in Australia and in laboratories around the world.
I looked at Kane’s paper and wondered how the materials I had been working with — complex oxides — might help. Materials like SrTiO3 and BaTiO3 are ferroelectrics and have spontaneous polarizations that can be programmed at extreme nanoscale dimensions. I thought about how nonlinear optical properties of ferroelectric materials might be used to address some technical challenges in a spins-in-silicon-style quantum computing architecture.
At the same time, a DARPA program solicitation called QuIST (Quantum Information Science and Technology) was announced, aiming to build quantum computers. Motivated by the funding opportunity, I developed a proposal for a quantum information processor that combined ferroelectric and nonlinear optical properties of ferroelectric materials coupled to silicon-germanium quantum dots. And I assembled a formidable team to help realize these ideas.
With fingers crossed, we submitted the proposal.
Because proposal success is never guaranteed, I decided to write up the key ideas of my proposal and submit them for publication. I also posted the manuscript on the ArXiv (https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0101026).
Shortly after posting my arxiv paper, I received a call from Rodney McKee. He told me that someone approached him with an idea that sounded very similar to mine, and this person was interested in teaming up with him to develop it.
This person had also written a manuscript, which Rodney forwarded to me.
It was my manuscript, word for word, except that my name, institution, and email was removed from the title page, and replaced with that of a stranger. I flipped through the paper and noticed that the figures were not the color versions, but grayscale reproductions that looked to be scanned.
Rodney wanted to know: was this person plagiarizing me, or was I plagiarizing him?
It took me several days to regain my composure. I contacted the relevant Dean of my plagiarizer’s institution, and explained what had happened. Some very rapid backtracking and distancing took place (“he’s an adjunct faculty, he basically doesn’t even work here, etc”). Ultimately, I became convinced that everything was wrapped up.
Except for one thing.
I remember precisely where I was standing, in my laboratory, when the phone rang. It was my plagiarizer. I don’t remember exactly what I said to him during that conversation. But he said one thing that I will never forget: “I hope this doesn’t mean that we can’t still collaborate.”
I think about those words from time to time. How clueless can someone be not to understand how fundamentally wrong it is to steal someone’s ideas without attribution, to plagiarize? Obviously I am not permanently scarred by this incident. My DARPA proposal was selected for funding. Although we did not produce a quantum computer at the end of those five years, the experience fundamentally transformed my thinking as a scientist. I hate to think of what would have happened if my ideas had been successfully stolen from me.