I t is a case as egregious, and as puzzling, in its way as the case of Mr. Shinichi Fujimura, the eminent Japanese archaeologist who was found two years ago to have faked a number of key discoveries. When Mr. Fujimura could not find the prehistoric stoneware pieces he was looking for, he did the next best thing: He buried look-alike objects at various archaeological sites and then made sure he was there, along with media crews, to "unearth" them. So numerous and significant were Mr. Fujimura's supposed finds that his colleagues used to say he had "a god's hands."

It was with a jolt of rueful recognition, therefore, that we read last week about the disgrace and exposure in the United States of a German physicist, said by his fellow scientists to have "magic hands." Had Japanese heard about that tribute earlier, they might have recognized it as a sign of something seriously amiss with the work of Dr. Jan Hendrik Schoen.

Since being hired by Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories in New Jersey five years earlier, Dr. Schoen had amassed a brilliant record in the cutting-edge research areas of superconductivity, molecular crystals and molecular electronics. At 31, he was already considered on track for a Nobel Prize. This was in part because of the importance of his chosen field. To simplify drastically, Dr. Schoen made his name with experiments designed to show that organic molecules, not just inorganic ones like silicon, could function as semiconductors or even superconductors. Plastic, for instance, is an organic molecule, and there are others, less familiar, that are all relatively cheap and easy to manufacture. The commercial applicability of Dr. Schoen's experiments, in fields from computers and medicine to the supply and distribution of electric power, was obvious. If, that is, the conductivity experiments succeeded.