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IDEAS & TRENDS: On Fusion, the Chemists Have the Ball Now
By George Johnson
The New York Times

May 7, 1989

IT is not often that the public gets to follow a scientific controversy blow by blow as if it were a football game.

Depending on who - chemists or physicists - happens to be holding a scientific conference, fusion in a bottle seems one week like the answer to the earth's prayers for energy, the next week like a mass epidemic of wishful thinking.

In mid-April, at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Dallas, chemists cheered the work of their colleagues, Drs. B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of Southampton University in England, who claim to have generated fusion at room temperature in a jar of water.

After years of expensive failures by physicists, ''it appears that chemists may have come to the rescue,'' the society's president, Dr. Clayton F. Callis, told an enthusiastic crowd.

Last week, the other team struck back.

At a meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore, physicists smugly reported that, try as they might, some of the best laboratories in the country have failed to replicate the cold fusion experiment. Physicists applauded when Dr. Steven E. Koonin said the phenomenon was a result of ''the incompetence and delusion of Pons and Fleischmann.''

This week it is the chemists' turn again.

At a meeting of the Electrochemical Society in Los Angeles, the two scientists will have the opportunity to respond to accusations that what has been hailed as the scientific breakthrough of the century is a mismeasurement caused by such simple errors as failing to install a stirring mechanism in the laboratory flask.

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