In 1990, a science journalist by the name of Gary Taubes took some facts and a good number of rumors and fabricated a story that destroyed the reputation of electrochemist John O'Mara Bockris (biography) and cast fear that impacted and harmed "cold fusion" researchers and their progress worldwide.
Taubes implied that Bockris and his group at Texas A&M University spiked their cold fusion cell with tritium and thus made a fraudulent claim of evidence for "cold fusion." Science bought Taubes' story and published it. Taubes ignored the evidence to the contrary that Bockris gave him before the story published.
Until then, Bockris was one of the most highly regarded electrochemists in the world, with more than 600 papers and a dozen books, including the widely used college text Modern Electrochemistry, to his credit.
Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen, and it typically exists as a gas. It is radioactive, but only for a short while. Its half-life is 12.5 years. The generation of tritium in low-energy nuclear reaction (historically known as cold fusion) experiments is rare, but when it shows up it is proof that a nuclear reaction has occurred.
Tritium does not exist in nature at significantly high levels, and its presence at levels significantly above background would have been hard evidence that some kind of nuclear reaction was occurring in cold fusion experiments.
The Science article by Taubes effectively destroyed the reputation that Bockris had built over his entire career. Because of the appearance of bad science, other journals were reluctant to publish the subsequent confirmatory evidence of this new field of nuclear energy research. A viscous circle was created. Validity of the science was stifled because of the stigma, the stigma was difficult to overcome because journals were averse to publish papers.
Taubes never had any hard evidence of fraud. He didn't accuse the Bockris group directly, but his implication was obvious. Science bought it hook line and sinker and pumped the story up even further with an advance news release; Bockris was toast.
Bockris had known that Taubes was developing this story and attempted, in good faith, to explain to Taubes why his speculation was groundless from a scientific basis. But Taubes didn't listen to this world-class electrochemist, whose first paper was published 44 years earlier in Nature.
The editors of Science most likely did not know about the letter Bockris sent to Taubes in advance of the article. In the letter, Bockris debunked Taubes' hypothesis of spiking. That Taubes failed to include the facts presented by Bockris in the article was grossly unprofessional. Taubes' ethics are brought further into question with the accounts of his intimidation, aggression, and attempts to coerce a confession from Bockris' graduate student, Nigel Packham.
After Science published the article, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, among the world's leading research institutions with expertise in tritium, performed an independent and unsolicited analysis of Taubes' hypothesis. The Los Alamos researchers found that the signature of spiked tritium in these cells could not possibly match the signature reported by the Bockris group.
Science declined to publish both a rebuttal letter from Bockris and the paper from Los Alamos radiochemist Ed Storms (biography).
On March 4, 2000, New Energy Times editor Steven B. Krivit met with Eugene F. Mallove, then the editor of Infinite Energy magazine, and picked up the trail of cold fusion research.
On July 10, 2004, Krivit traveled to Texas and met with Bockris and his wife, Lily Bockris, to get his story.
On Oct. 6, 2006, Krivit sent a letter explaining the matter and providing a Web link to the full details of this story to Science editor Donald Kennedy, to John Holdren, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the parent organization of Science, and to Gilbert S. Omenn and David Baltimore, also on the organization’s board. Krivit requested a correction to the record. Science and the organization failed to provide a response.
On Feb. 15, 2007, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Francisco, Krivit hand-delivered a second copy of his October letter to Holdren. (President-elect Barack Obama later named Holdren as his science adviser.)
On Feb. 18, still at the AAAS meeting, Krivit met with Earl Lane, senior communications officer for the organization, and provided him with a full set of the printed evidence. Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have failed to respond.
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