A former science writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Friday accused school researchers of fiddling with data and molding media coverage to discredit cold fusion.
Ron Parker, director of MIT's Plasma Fusion Center, dismissed the charges as "ludicrous."Eugene Mallove, who worked in the MIT News Office, has written "Fire From Ice," a book that says the phantom phenomenon of cold fusion can work. He resigned June 7, saying that irked officials at the center decided to minimize cold fusion research.
"That's instantaneous prescription for embarrassment," Mallove said. "It's equivalent to someone not putting the plug for an appliance in."
University of Utah chemist B. Stanley Pons and British colleague Martin Fleischmann announced in 1989 that they had achieved cold fusion in a jar, raising the prospect of a cheap, safe and virtually inexhaustible source of energy.
But many critics remain unconvinced, including MIT researchers who conducted several months of tests on cold fusion in 1989. Results showed that the Utah researchers made a "monumental mistake" in their work, Parker said.
Mallove acknowledged Pons and Fleischmann made errors in their experiment, but he believes MIT researchers skewed their own data and covered up positive test results.
"MIT has gone seriously astray here because it has not been conducting any experiments since it first threw in the towel" on cold fusion, he said.
MIT researchers may have dismissed cold fusion because it challenged their knowledge of how nuclear reactions work, he said.
In fusion, the process that powers the sun, atoms are fused rather than split as in nuclear fission. Scientists have long sought its secrets to produce safe, inexpensive energy.
In a May 1989 Boston Herald article, Parker was reported to have accused the Utah scientists of misrepresentation and possibly fraud and called the research "scientific schlock."
"It was a completely orchestrated attempt to mold media opinion in a very, very negative way on Pons and Fleischmann," said Mal-love, who has no professional ties with the Utah researchers.
Parker denied he accused the scientists of fraud.
Mallove, who says he has been denied access to the MIT test results on cold fusion, plans to submit a formal request that the university investigate the experi-ments.
Parker said the center has offered to have a staff member go over the data with Mallove.
"We don't feel comfortable releasing all the books to him," Parker said. Cold fusion continues to divide the scientific community. Earlier this year, the federal Department of Energy's director of energy research, James F. Decker, concluded there was "no future energy source in cold fusion."