It turns out that we’ve just passed
the 30th anniversary of the announcement of the most revolutionary of
scientific discoveries. On 23rd March, 1989 Martin Fleischmann
and Stanley Pons held a press conference (you can still see it on
YouTube) and told the world that they had found a relatively simple way of
producing nuclear fusion, the process that fuels stars and very large
explosions. Decades and tens of billions of dollars had been spent on finding a
way of doing this on earth in a controlled way in order to generate clean
energy at minimal cost (the irony!). Fleischmann and Pons (who for brevity I’ll
call F & P), claimed they could do it in a test tube with some fancy
electrodes, an electric current and water. The process was called “cold fusion”
and the reason you’ve probably never have heard of it is, of course, that it quickly
turned out that they hadn’t discovered anything of the sort.
It’s hard to overstate the potential
implications of their “discovery”. Abundant, cheap, clean energy – imagine the
impact that would have had on climate change and the carbon crisis. And it didn’t
take long for the notion that cold fusion might have military and strategic applications
to start exercising the minds of governments across the globe. In the US, where
the announcement was made (F & P conducted their experiments at the
university of Utah, where Pons was chairman of the Chemistry department) the
Department of Energy went into overdrive.
It ordered its labs to find out if the claims were true, diverting teams
of scientists from their own projects. Weekly meetings were convened and
reports sent to Washington to the Secretary for Energy. Eventually the
President was briefed. This was serious stuff.
The scientific community at large was desperate
for details of F & P’s experiment. At the time of their press conference
they hadn’t published any of their results, although they had submitted a paper
to the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. The Editor understood well the
potential importance of their results and fast-tracked the paper through the
peer review process. However, when it was published it was relatively short, lacked
detail and contained a number of errors. A paper that was submitted to Nature
was withdrawn. Very quickly it began to emerge that the initial claims were wrong,
the result not so much of fraud or mendacity, but sloppy science, lack of
precision and over interpretation. The following year a paper was published
reporting results obtained using exactly the same equipment as in the original
experiment – no evidence of cold fusion was found. And there you might have
though the story would have ended. Interesting to historians or science, but
really just a footnote that the rest of us could forget. But then there is the
money.
Money, it turns out, is involved in
this story from the beginning. The University of Utah quickly had its patent
lawyers on the case, and quickly devoted $5M to support cold fusion research.
It also lobbied the US Government for tens of millions more dollars for the research
(an effort that was unsuccessful). Industry, private equity and philanthropy got
involved. By 1992 F & P were in France working with a Toyota subsidiary, an
effort that eventually burned through $12M dollars and ended in 1998. Well after
mainstream science had moved on, pockets of researchers in both government and
private labs continued to beaver away at cold fusion (and still do). There has
been no fusion success, although it’s arguable that there might have been some useful
spin-offs.
The money kept flowing. Google, no
less, spent another $10M on cold fusion research, between 2015 and 2019, announcing
only just last week the end of its efforts (see this commentary in Nature). It was reported in the Financial Times that a
company in North Carolina, founded by a businessman with a background in
brickmaking, had attracted upwards of $100M
to develop, you’ve guessed it, cold fusion (although these days it tends
to be called “low-energy nuclear reactions”). Money came from a range of funds and groups. It’s
genuinely difficult to tell the grifters from the marks, who are the dupes and
who are the gamblers. Somebody appears to making a living (if not useful quantities
of electricity) out of the remains of F & P’s ideas.
It turns out that real scientific
revolutions are scarce. And they are often only recognised long after the
revolution has occurred. Scientific revolutions that have big practical impacts
on society, that lead to radical transformations in what and how we do things
are even rarer, and usually come from long years of hard slog rather than
eureka moments. It’s said of financial advertising that if something seems too
good to be true, it probably is. The same is true of scientific claims, particularly
those made in press conferences. But it would appear there are gullible people
out there, and some of them are minted.
Scientists are human (yes it’s true!) and
like most humans we are not immune to influences from outside the lab, from journalists,
university administrators, patent lawyers, governments, investors et al. The
priority of journalists (for whose benefit press conferences are run), particularly
those who have a poor understanding of science, is to simplify and categorise information
in the best way get their efforts into news bulletins or prominent pages in the
publications they write for. It’s not that they are uninterested in accuracy
and precision just that it’s not at the top of their priority list. So we
should withstand the temptation of the quick, easy, simple story, and wait for
the boring slog of control experiments, confirmation and replication. With cold
fusion that’s what happened, and quite quickly. Just not quickly enough for F
& P.
While not entirely victims, I do feel
a tad of sympathy for F & P. They took the heat (if you’ll allow me to mix
my metaphors) that others, who were probably more deserving, escaped. They were
the focus of that now infamous press conference. We all marched to the top of
the hill with them, before tumbling down the other side. But they then got
steamrollered. Many of us, placed under the pressure they found themselves
under, might have made some of the poor choices they made. The warning of
Proverbs 14:12 comes to mind.
