The chief science writer for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to resign over MIT researchers' criticism of Utah scientists who first claimed to produce cold fusion.
Eugene Mallove, a four-year employee of the MIT office, announced his plans Friday at a seminar at MIT's Plasma Fusion Center, the Boston Herald reported on Saturday.In remarks to about 80 seminar attendants, Mallove said MIT researcher Frank Close and other skeptics at MIT and elsewhere have unfairly derided the 1989 cold-fusion claims by University of Utah researchers B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.
Close was a leading critic of the work by Pons and Fleischmann.
Mallove charged that Close and others have failed to credit dozens of follow-up experiments at government and university labs that have replicated parts of the work.
Mallove is the author of a new book, "Fire and Ice," which argues there is strong evidence that cold fusion exists. He said Friday he was uncomfortable acting as an MIT spokesman when its fusion center has been so critical of cold-fusion claims.
He said he has not been pressured to leave because of his book, despite its criticism of the fusion attacks by MIT and others.
Mallove based his decision on several incidents, including an MIT analysis of the Utah work issued in May 1989, five weeks after Pons and Fleischmann claimed to have produced fusion in a device they said had commercial applications, the Herald report said.
The MIT analysis debunked the claims and in an interview with the Herald, fusion center head Dr. Ronald Parker said the chemists misinterpreted their results. Parker also called the claims "scientific schlock," the Herald said.
National criticism and a questioning of the results of the Utah work followed.
Mallove said he was upset by the MIT center's failure to make public key data from its Utah analysis, the school administration's failure to respond to his request to review the cold-fusion work, and the refusal of MIT's Technology Review magazine to publish a 9,000-word article he wrote on the issue in April.