MIT Alleges Fraud Against Pons and Fleischmann
by Eugene Mallove, excerpted from "MIT and Cold Fusion- A Special Report"
Historically, it is evident that this Herald story helped unleash
the tidal wave of negativity against Fleischmann and Pons and
others who continue to work in the field. Ironically, Parker et al.
accomplished what they really set out to do with that story, but
at the time Parker attacked reporter Tate for allegedly mis-reporting
what he had said during his interview. Tate came very close
to being fired on the spot by his editor; he would have been fired
had he not had an audio tape of the interview to confirm what
he had been told by Parker. After all, it was an MIT professor’s
word against that of a young reporter.
A frantic Ronald Parker, perhaps fearing that he would be
sued by Pons and Fleischmann for the harsh words that were
quoted a bit too explicitly for his taste, called me late on the
night of April 30, 1989. He had me dispatch a press release to the
wire services denying the impending Boston Herald story, the exact
nature of which he had learned from a call from CBS television...
I had been up into the wee hours of the night of April 30-May 1, 1989, sending a press release dictated to me over the telephone at my home in Bow, New Hampshire by Professor Parker. I telephoned it to UPI, Reuters, and the Associated Press, and it denied what Parker had said in the interview with the Boston Herald’s Nick Tate. When I arrived at the MIT News Office early that morning after a sleepless night, we hastily put together a printed form of the press release to handle the approaching storm...
Of course, I had at that time no reason to doubt what he was telling me: that the story was a distortion. I would learn the stark truth about this deception only over a year later when Tate allowed me to listen to the actual tape...
On June 7, 1991 I resigned from the MIT News Office, to
protest the outrageous behavior of the PFC and others at MIT
against cold fusion... On the
day of my resignation from my MIT News Office position, June
7, 1991, I publically disavowed this Press Release—an unintended
falsification of the truth in which I was used as a dupe in
part of an orchestrated campaign against cold fusion.
Mallove was the Chief Science Writer at the MIT News Office at the time of this controversy. He was one of the few people who spoke out, and recognized early on that something was wrong with the official "cold fusion" story that was being told by the scientists at his institution to the public. |
