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A Sound Investment?
By Eugenie Samuel Reich
Nature
Published online: Wednesday, 8 March 2006
Rejection Leaves Bubble-fusion Patent High and Dry.
The US patent office has been drawn into the debate over whether bubble fusion has been achieved. In a crushing rejection of a patent application on the phenomenon, patent examiner Ricardo Palabrica concludes that despite the claims for bubble fusion presented in Science1 in 2002, he doesn't believe a word of them. "There is no reputable evidence of record to support any allegations or claims that the invention is capable of operating as indicated," he writes.
So far, science fiction: the US patent office says there is as yet no reputable evidence for bubble fusion.
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In 2003, while at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan filed the US patent application with his co-author Colin West, on behalf of the US Department of Energy (DOE), which funded their work. It describes the idea of using an acoustic chamber designed by West to produce thermonuclear fusion. In support of the application, Taleyarkhan submitted data from his Science paper, in which he reported having observed bubble fusion in such a chamber.
Palabrica was unimpressed. In his assessment, published in September 2005, he attacks Taleyarkhan's claimed invention as "nothing more than a variation" of the discredited concept of cold fusion first put forward in the late 1980s by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, and cites reproducibility concerns as a serious obstacle to obtaining a patent. "The statute requires the applicant to inform, not to direct others to find out for themselves [how to reproduce the invention]," he writes.
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The examiner refers to press reports about the row that ensued when Science published Taleyarkhan's paper despite objections by the scientists who peer-reviewed it, as well as a study by Dan Shapira and Michael Saltmarsh,2 also at Oak Ridge, who had tried and failed to reproduce Taleyarkhan's results.
Examiners would not take controversy alone as a basis for rejecting a patent, says Arnold Silverman, who for 14 years ran the intellectual-property group at the law firm Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But he says that it is not unheard of for a patent examiner who is already sceptical to use other reports to put the burden of proof back on the applicant. "They will challenge the claimed utility of the invention," Silverman says.
Palabrica notes in his rejection that the patent office is aware that the field of fusion research has been particularly prone to erroneous claims, and that for this reason he wanted extra evidence that potential sources of error had been ruled out.
The rejection could have been appealed but in December 2005 the DOE instead abandoned the claim altogether. A version of the patent filed in 2002 at the World Intellectual Property Organization is still under review in many countries.
This online issue of Nature contained a bubble fusion special report. The other articles in the report are:
Bubble fusion: silencing the hype
Is bubble fusion simply hot air?
Bubble bursts for table-top fusion
References
- Taleyarkhan R. P, et al. Science, 295 . 1868 - 1873 (2002).
- Shapira A.D, Saltmarsh M.D, et al. Phys. Rev. Lett., 89 . 104302 (2002).
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