Undead Science: Science Studies and the Afterlife of Cold Fusion (review)

Fusion energy production is promising—in 2003 the United States joined the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project—but has shown few tangible or commercial results after decades of research. I remember a family dinner nearly 40 years ago, when our guest was the rotund (nearly 400-lb) scientist Keeve M. Siegel. Siegel announced to his colleague, my late father, that he was leaving the University of Michigan engineering faculty to start a fusion energy research company called KMS Fusion. A decade later I read that Siegel died in Washington, D.C., while giving testimony on the importance of fusion research to the U.S. Congress.

Siegel does not appear in Undead Science, for the book flies over the decades of "hot" fusion research around the world to begin with the 1989 announcement by the University of Utah's Stanley B. Pons and Martin Fleischmann of successful experiments producing nuclear energy by "cold" fusion. The results that the two collaborators announced promised energy obtained more easily and at lower temperatures than required by previous reactor processes. This book moves beyond the individual case into a meditation on the public reception of science. Author Bart Simon explores how a promising field can quickly be branded by the scientific mainstream as pseudoscience when irreproducible (hence erroneous) results are announced in public, which was Pons and Fleischmann's crime. Experiments in other labs showed evidence of some sort of energy production, though not of the magnitude that the two Utah researchers claimed. Yet the premature media hooplah surrounding their announcement had already discredited the entire field.

Simon builds a context for Pons and Fleischmann's 15 minutes of fame. He cites Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and discusses the mid-19th-century Devonian controversy about the age of certain fossils. His text is informed by his own period of research in a fusion lab, as well as communication with a variety of scientists, whom he quotes both by name and anonymously. My father would have enjoyed this book for its update of international fusion research and publications through the 1990s, including subsequent work by Pons and Fleischmann. He would have shelved it beside Eugene Mallove's more enthusiastic and optimistic Fire from Ice: Searching for the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor.

As this is a book about science in society and political positioning among practicing scientists, there is one political aspect of fusion research regrettably omitted from Undead Science. Publications by the U.S. Labor Party and its central figure Lyndon Larouche were often distributed a decade ago in downtown Mountain View, California, the heart of Silicon Valley (boasting first Fairchild Semiconductor, then Silicon Graphics and Netscape, now Google and a Nokia lab). A quirky politicial mix of right and left, the party had some electoral success in local races despite the stiff prison sentence given Larouche for financial infractions. Its significance here is that it saw and trumpeted fusion as the answer to America's energy needs, publishing reports and magazines on the topic for several years. Larouchites are a footnote in American political history, but a deserving footnote in any cultural history of fusion energy. Since Bart Simon is based in Montréal, Canada, he may be unaware of this tiny party in the U.S. with a fusion-friendly technology policy.