For more than two years, condensed matter physicists were enthralled by results coming out of Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, where researchers had developed a technique to make organic materials behave in amazing new ways: as superconductors, as lasers, as Josephson junctions, and as single‐molecule transistors. (PHYSICSTODAYran news stories on some of these topics in May 2000, page 23; September 2000, page 17; January 2001, page 15; and October 2001, page 19.) Increasingly, however, enthusiasm gave way to frustration, as research groups were unable to reproduce the results. Was the technique exceedingly difficult to master, or was something else amiss?