Years ago, physicist James Brophy was offered the chance to buy patents for a new invention, a hand-held camera that made pictures of documents.
Brophy passed on the opportunity, as did other scientists he knew. They watched as that patent led to the office copy machine, which became as indispensable as Scotch tape.Two years ago, when another ground-level scientific discovery surfaced, Brophy relished the risk. From his chair as vice president of research for the University of Utah, Brophy was a key cheerleader when two U. scientists - B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann - said they had discovered the secret of cold fusion in a jar.
"I'd like science to be a spectator sport like football," Brophy says.
Brophy, who calls himself an unavowed optimist, calls the cold-fusion phenomenon a "gee whiz" kind of science story. He admits that the state's $5 million in economic development money was invested on the "wild-eyed chance" of harnessing a clean, unlimited energy supply. Now that the money's gone, Brophy and others are saying it could be years before Utah reaps any commercial profit from patent applications, if ever.
But the promise of energy made the gamble worth it, Brophy said. "This is not your run-of-the-mill fourth electron on the carbon atom. This had social implications."
Despite the heat generated by plunging the university into a scientific maelstrom, Brophy says he would do it all again. "The only other thing to do is nothing. We gave it our best try. It didn't develop the way we thought it would. A lot of claims were staked that didn't have gold on them."
Utah's highly publicized flirtation with the weird science of cold fusion is waning. The U.'s National Cold Fusion Institute will close as funds run out on June 30. The institute never garnered the private funding that state and U. officials banked on.
But Fritz Will, institute director, said new experiments are generating promising results, although no heat. Despite the skepticism generated by talk of cold fusion by the scientific world, Will proclaimed he is absolutely convinced that a nuclear phenomenon - some form of fusion - is occurring in institute beakers.
He joked with reporters at a news conference Thursday. "I am very upbeat, and that's almost strange about two weeks before the institute is scheduled to close. That, of course, could be prevented if any of you is willing to write a check for a few hundred thousand dollars."
Will said he's submitting a paper to a scientific journal documenting nuclear byproducts produced in eight vacuum-sealed cells. Researchers can generate tritium regularly at up to 50 times above background amounts. Tritium - considered important evidence that a nuclear reaction is occurring - has little commercial use besides in hydrogen bombs. And even the hydrogen bomb industry is faltering just now.
That's just another twist that makes Utah's cold-fusion episode so intriguing. The world watched because of the experiment's promise to generate heat commercially. Now Utah scientists are continuing the research because they see tritium, which has no real commercial use besides in bombs.
But Brophy thinks Utah should be proud. He believes investing the money showed courage. "I think some of us fell into a trap of expecting science to move faster than Mother Nature allowed.
"It wasn't our fault," Brophy said. "It wasn't Stan and Martin's fault. It was just a combination of all the ingredients stirred into a pot.
"In cold fusion, nothing can be done quietly."
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U. reputation `intact'
Despite the headlines, James Brophy, U. vice president for research, says the confusion of cold fusion hasn't hurt the school's reputation. At least, not in any way that can be measured. The university has attracted more grant money this year, has more applicants for graduate programs in scientific fields and hasn't lost any more faculty members than usual.