Patent angles in the fraud of Jan Hendrik Schon

In the case of the fraud of Jan-Hendrik Schon, Bell Labs was quick to withdraw Schon's patent applications, which were pulled long before Schon's papers were.

Patent applications of other workers at Bell Labs may have been the origin of Schon's downfall. Text from scientificblogging:

two fellow physicists, Julia Hsu and Lynn Loo, attempted to patent research showing that soft lithography could be used to make softer and gentler contact with organic molecules and they used Schön's paper as validation of how cutting-edge their experimental progress was; that's when they stumbled across duplicated data and sounded the alarm.

Of the inventors [ Hsu, Julia Wan-Ping; (Berkeley Heights, NJ) ; Loo, Yueh-Lin; (Princeton, NJ) ; Rogers, John A.; (New Providence, NJ) ], note US published application 20030175154.

Separately, note US 6,872,645 [to Nanosys], filed September 10, 2002, which cited two of Schon's papers:

Schon et al., "Field-effect modulation of the conductance of single molecules" (2001) Science 294:2138.
Schon et al., "Self-assembled monolayer organic field-effect transistors" (2001) Nature 413:713.

The investigation of the Schon fraud began in May 2002.