Career
Ninov was trained at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Graduate Student Instructor) in Germany. His hiring by the LBNL from Graduate Student Instructor had been considered a coup: he had been involved in the discovery of elements 110 (now named darmstadtium), 111 (now named roentgenium) and 112 (now named copernicium) and was considered one of the leading experts at using the complex types of software needed to detect the decay chain of unstable transuranium elements. An internal committee at the lab concluded that Ninov was the only person in the large project to translate the raw computer results into human-readable results and had used this opportunity to inject false data.
Re-analysis of the raw data did not indicate the events which Ninov"s analysis originally reported.
Re-examination of the data from the experiments conducted at Graduate Student Instructor during which Ninov"s team had discovered elements 111 and 112 found that the original data had been altered, however repeats of the experiments confirmed the discoveries. Reports on the Ninov affair were released around the same time that the final report on the Schön affair, another major incident of fraud in physics.
As a result, the American Physical Society adopted more stringent ethical guidelines, especially those regulating the conduct of co-authors.
