1 Etienne Klein, a celebrated French physicist and popularizer of science, seems set to lose his post as president of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology (IHEST) in Paris after allegations that he plagiarized the work of more than a dozen scientists, philosophers and writers in various books and articles. A source at France’s Ministry of Science and Education yesterday confirmed that a decree ending Klein's tenure has been signed by the current minister and is now awaiting the signature of French President Francois Hollande.
2 But Klein says he refuses to leave. In an open letter published last week, he wrote that an investigative panel that looked into the matter has found no evidence of misconduct and that he sees no reason to step down. “My scientific integrity is absolute,” Klein wrote to science journalists in an email. The report has not been made public.
3 Klein leads a small group studying science itself at the Alternative Energies and Atomic fame Energy Commission(CEA) near Paris, but seldom publishes in the scientific literature; his fame stems from books and articles in popular magazines, mostly about physics. He also hosts a weekly radio show about science. President Hollande appointed Klein president of IHEST—which seeks to build trust in science and to reflect on its social economic and political aspects—in September 2016.
4 In November, the weekly magazine L’ Express reported that Klein had copied passages from French and foreign authors in a recent biography of Albert Einstein and in several other publications. Klein defended some of the instances but admitted he had made “mistakes” in others; a few days later, L' Express published seven more examples of alleged plagiarism, to which Klein has not responded.
5 CEA has not investigated the matter. A spokesperson says Klein wrote the disputed publications on his own time, not as a CEA researcher. “This is a private matter,” the spokesperson says. This is why government officials asked an independent four-member panel to investigate the charges. The commission finished its work in late January, but when it presented its report to the government, nothing happened for almost 2 months. Then Klein published his open letter on 29 March.
6 In the letter, he quoted a few paragraphs from the report in which the commission said it had not found ethical breaches in Kleins work for CEA and that it was neither “competent” nor tasked to judge whether Klein committed plagiarism in the legal sense. Nonetheless, the commission recommended that he step down from IHEST, Klein wrote, “so as not to cause difficulties for the institute and its important missions.” Klein says he has no intention of doing so. “I don’t want to be judged by the press, but according to the criteria of French law,” he wrote in an email.
7 The leader of the four-member panel says he can't discuss the report; he says he hopes it will be made public by the authorities. But he confirms that the panel did not consider the issue of whether Kleins reuse of other writers’ words broke any laws. “Klein came to the commission with his lawyer,” he says, “we’re not judges, were not the police, we're just four academics.”
8 Klein says that his book about Einstein contains more than 120 attributed quotes as well, which “proves that I have no problem with quoting someone. What I am being blamed for is due to carelessness or negligence, especially in my file management, not to a conscious desire to plagiarize.”
9 In a story published last week, L* Express speculates that Klein’s open letter may have been a last-ditch effort to avert his dismissal or delay a decision until after the upcoming elections, in the hope that a new president might save him. But Klein says he is not aware of any decision to fire him. He says he went public because he had expected the commission to publicly reaffirm his scientific integrity. “That was a key issue for me, Klein says. “When nothing happened in that regard, I decided to speak out myself.”
1.Based on this very recent article, we may assume that Etienne Klein is （ ）.
2.The information in this article seems to indicate that Klein （ ）.
3.At the time this article was written, Klein appeared to be on the verge of getting fired from at least one of his positions. His reaction has been to （ ）.
4.In his work at IHEST Klein（ ） .
