The Long Overdue Downfall of Étienne Klein
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Étienne Klein has had a science career that most can only dream of.
He is a research director at Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA) and, as part of that, is the head of Laboratoire des Recherches sur les Sciences de la Matière (LARSIM), a research laboratory at the CEA.
He also worked at CERN during the early 90s and was involved as an engineer in the design of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). He previously taught both quantum physics and particle physics at École Centrale Paris and was a member of several prestigious scientific committees.
However, he is probably best known for his work as a scientific communicator. He has written and published dozens of books, hosts a pair of radio shows, and maintains a large social media presence. Especially in the French-speaking world, he is one of the best known and most influential science communicators.
Unfortunately, over the past decade, his reputation has fallen apart. Now, just within the past few weeks, according to media reports, he lost his PhD as his alma mater, the University of Paris-Cité, revoked his degree. The reason for this downfall comes down to a single word: plagiarism.
So what happened and what is likely coming next? To understand that, we need to go back ten years to when the story first started.
The First Rumblings
Disclosure: Whenever possible, I used English-language sources, most notably the great work at Science. However, when using French sources, I used automatic translation tools, which may have introduced errors.
On November 30, 2016, the French newspaper L’Express published an article claiming that Klein’s then-recent biography of Albert Einstein used passages almost verbatim from various other sources.
The allegations also targeted a column that he had written about the science of the perfect free kick in soccer, which the facile claimed borrowed heavily on a 1986 book by physicists Gilles Cohen-Tannoudji and Michel Spiro.
Klein, for his part, gave a mixed response to the allegations. He denied that several of the shorter passages were plagiarism and, instead, were examples of things that normally aren’t cited. To that end, he had a defender in Cohen-Tannoudji himself, who said that Klein didn’t need to cite him in the column and had given him credit on his radio program and elsewhere.
However, with the longer passages, Klein admitted to making “mistakes that I regret.” He blamed the issues on his chaotic writing process and admitted that he had not cited the sources properly.
Still, he overall tried to downplay the issue and this resulted in L’Express digging even deeper into his work and then finding more examples of plagiarism in it. This included several lengthy verbatim passages from various sources and authors. This illustrated that the problem with Klein’s work was not a handful of isolated mistakes, but rather a systematic issue with his writing.
However, the scandal didn’t have any significant consequences for Klein. His career continued with the scandal being largely a footnote.
Then, in August 2022, he found himself in the middle of a very different scandal. He published a tweet that he claimed was a photo from the new James Webb Space Telescope of our nearest star, Proxima Centauri. However, he later admitted that the image was a joke and was, in fact, a slice of chorizo (sausage).
The joke did not go over well with his audience. The issue of fake news and the spread of misinformation was at a fever pitch at the time and he was heavily criticized for the hoax.
However, according to Peter Coles, the joke wasn’t even original. It was a repeat of a joke he had made the day before, also on Twitter.
Unfortunately for Klein, “chorizogate” would not be the end of his controversies; the worst was yet to come.
The Final Act
In August 2024, Loris Guémart and Jean Abbiateci from Arrêt sur images (ASI) published an extensive article on allegations of plagiarism in Klein’s 1999 dissertation. According to the report, Klein had lifted content from approximately 20 authors and regularly copied and pasted entire paragraphs without quotation marks or any attribution.
At that time, Paris Cité University launched its own investigation into the allegations. At the time, it said the final report would be released by the end of 2025. That deadline came and went with no word from the university.
However, according to ASI, anonymous reports from within the university say that the school has revoked Klein’s doctorate. According to another source speaking with Le Monde, the university found plagiarism with roughly two-thirds of the dissertation.
In a currently-pinned post from June 19 on X (formerly Twitter), Klein has also shared that his long-running radio show on France Culture has been cancelled.
The responses to this cancellation have been mixed. Many thanked Klein for his work and expressed dismay at the news, while others said that he was a fraud and that his downfall was long overdue.
To that end, the fallout over his degree revocation is likely to continue for some time. However, given that Klein is 68 years old and likely at the tail end of his career, it’s unlikely to have much impact on his future prospects.
Regardless of how serious the fallout is, it’s likely to be the punctuation mark at the end of his career, rightly or wrongly.
My Analysis
Long-time readers of this site (and some short-time ones as well) will know that I talk a great deal about “The Dark Age of Academic Plagiarism.” It’s a period of time between the mid-1990s to the late 2000s when academic institutions had widespread access to the internet but limited access or no access to tools to detect plagiarism.
Klein’s dissertation, which was defended in 1999 and published in 2000, falls almost exactly in the middle of that period.
Note: I received an email from Jean Abbiateci at ASI who informed me that their analysis was not done using plagiarism analysis software, but was done manually. That said, reliable and remotely complete search engines were also scarce in 1999, (Google had only launched one year prior) so the school still would have struggled. Still, that makes the feat by the reporters all the more impressive. I also want to highlight this article by Abbiateci, which highlights much of the process.
As such, it’s easy to see how such a plagiarism-laden dissertation could have been successfully defended and published. What is much less clear is why it took 20 months to reach that conclusion and why there still has been no formal announcement from the university.
Klein’s rise through academia came at a very specific time in history in which something like this was not just possible, but even somewhat common. Klein’s 2016 scandal was a warning that he had not changed his practices since 1999 and was continuing to plagiarize the works of others.
However, somehow, Klein escaped a deeper investigation into his work. Yes, there were more instances of plagiarism in his non-academic works, but no one, at that time, looked deeper into his academic work.
The fact that it didn’t come until 2024 is not much of a surprise. That was the year we saw that playbook used, to mixed effect, against politically targeted academics in the United States. Though examining dissertations and theses for plagiarism has been (and still is) a common tactic in other European countries for some time for politicians, 2024 was a breakout year for the tactic to target academics.
To be clear, just because politicians or academics are targeted for one reason or another doesn’t mean that they didn’t commit plagiarism. It just means that the investigations were not chosen randomly. Those investigations still need to be judged on their merits.
To that end, Klein’s plagiarism is extremely clear. His dissertation would never have passed muster today. Even a cursory plagiarism examination would have found significant issues. He only received his doctorate because such an investigation was nearly impossible in 1999. Turnitin, for example, did not launch until the next year and would not become widely available, let alone in the French language, until much later.
Klein earned his doctorate during a sliver of opportunity that was already closing behind him. And while fraudulent PhDs and other degrees are still a problem, this particular path, copying and pasting your way through a legitimate school, has largely been shuttered.
Bottom Line
After spending a lot of time going through the articles and documents, I have no doubt that Klein’s career was built on fraud. His school revoking his degree is the exclamation point on that. Through good fortune and good timing, he avoided the scrutiny that is commonplace today and was able to build an impressive career of the academic equivalent of quicksand.
It’s also clear that the fraud didn’t stop after his dissertation. The other examples of plagiarism point to a pattern of behavior that is deeply troubling for any academic, let alone such a public figure.
However, I also understand why the feelings around him are mixed. His credentials may have been fraudulent, but the feelings he engendered, including the interest in science, are not. I am very sure that there are many legitimate scientists who owe at least some of their careers to him.
It’s those people who I feel bad for. They did nothing wrong, but now wonderful memories from their past and part of their backstory have an asterisk placed next to them. They have to either have to work to separate the man from the message or live with the realization that someone they once looked up to was a fraud.
In short, Klein’s misdeeds have tainted his legacy, not just his own, but how that legacy lives on in the minds of those he inspired. There will always be an asterisk. There will always be a black mark.
And, though Klein seems to be swift to shirk responsibility for that, it’s his actions, both 26 years ago and throughout his career, that caused that. If he had followed the rules and rigors of academia and taken his responsibilities to cite his sources seriously, this would not have happened.
He would still be universally revered, and his work would still be cherished. Now, that will never be the case again.
Klein, and Klein alone, is responsible for this.
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