MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report - Infinite Energy Magazine

Exhibit Z
President Charles Vest’s Letter to Eugene Mallove
January 6, 1992
President Vest’s penultimate brush-off letter, which suggests no
need to do anything further. He checked with his legal counsel
regarding the matter of unethical press deception, which he
calls “bias in dealing with the media.”—EFM
CHARLES M. VEST, PRESIDENT, Room 3-208
Dr. Eugene F. Mallove, Bow, New
Dear Dr. Mallove:
In your letter of October 24, 1991 commenting upon Professor Philip
Morrison's report on his inquiry into your concern about possible scientific
misconduct in the paper by Albagli et al., you acknowledge Professor
Morrison as:
a gifted scientist and educator, a man of impeccable character and
one of the finest human beings I know. I also count him as a friend
and a person who made an honest attempt to be fair to all sides in
his letter to you. I deeply appreciate the time and effort he made on
your and my behalf. With that said, I regret to tell you that I am in
substantial disagreement with Dr. Morrison's conclusions about
the technical matters that he discussed.
I agree with all you have to say about Professor Morrison and am left
with the question of whether I should ignore his conclusions and order
the additional investigation which you requested in your October 24 letter.
Since receiving your letter, I have sought an additional independent
review by Professor J. David Litster, our interim Associate Provost and
Vice President for Research, and he has confirmed Professor Morrison’s
conclusion that there is no basis for further investigation of the charges
of scientific misconduct. I have also considered, and sought advice from
legal counsel, on whether it was necessary or appropriate for me to
investigate your charges of bias in dealing with the media, and I have
concluded that is neither necessary nor appropriate for me to do so.
You will recall that Professor Morrison did recommend “that PFC
should spend a personal day or two of work to compute the mean
excess power for all four cases, the light and heavy water cells under the
two protocols of drift correction.” However, your letter of October 24,
1991 rejects this suggestion, so I am not requesting that it be done.
In closing, I do wish to express my regret for the length of time that
it has taken to respond to your letter of October 24. Because the Provost
had participated in the Albagli paper, I thought it best if I dealt with
your concerns personally, and between a long trip in November and the
holidays, this is the first opportunity I have had to respond.
Sincerely yours, Charles M. Vest
CMV:cbb
Exhibit Z-1
Eugene Mallove’s Letter to President Charles Vest
February 9, 1992
New evidence in the form of Dr. Mitchell R. Swartz’s analysis of the
MIT PFC data manipulation had come to my attention. My request
for a thorough investigation became more emphatic.—EFM
President Charles M. Vest, MIT Room 3-208
Dear Dr. Vest:
I had intended to reply promptly to your letter of 6 January 1992, but
new information was unexpectedly brought to my attention, which
delayed my response. I am referring to the substance of the draft report,
“Semiquantitative Analysis and Examination of MIT PFC Phase-II Cold
Fusion Data,” which MIT graduate Dr. Mitchell R. Swartz submitted to
you on 28 January after a lengthy period of very careful consideration.
He has discussed his analysis with me and given me a copy of the
report that he submitted to you and to Professor Ronald R. Parker. Let
me assure you that Dr. Swartz initiated his investigation independently.
I was surprised—shocked would be a better word—to see what he
found. I was given a copy of his report to verify the accuracy of Dr.
Swartz's use of quotations from correspondence that I had allowed him
to see. Later, I requested and received a copy of his draft report.
In your one-page letter of 6 January, you mention consultations with
your colleagues, Professor J. David Litster and legal counsel. Based on
these consultations and the previous memorandum submitted to you by
Professor Philip Morrison, you presumed that you had dealt appropriately
with my request for a misconduct investigation. I am sure that it will
not surprise you to hear now that I emphatically disagree. I am extremely
disappointed that you chose to sweep this serious matter under the rug
with what I consider to be a totally inadequate response. I trust, however,
that what Dr. Swartz’s analysis has revealed about the MIT PFC
“Phase-II” data will have dismayed you and your colleagues and will
lead you to quickly reverse your dismissal of my charges. It seems that
Dr. Swartz has performed a major part of the investigation that I believe
should have been your business to require, but which you did not.
To summarize what I understand Dr. Swartz has discovered about
the PFC data from his computer processing of the electro-optically
scanned published and unpublished PFC results:
(1) Extra data points have been arbitrarily and inexplicably added to
the published heavy water curve. These may amount to between 10 and
20 percent of the data points.
(2) The addition of two more “data points” at the portion of
the curve, which in the July 10 pre-publication data exists as a
time-calibration mark. These points were clearly arbitrarily
placed in their vertical positions. They should not have been
published as data points if they were mere time-calibration
points. (This is not a small matter, see comment below.)
(3) Conclusive evidence that the light water data and the heavy water
data were “processed” differently. The light water data that was finalized
on July 13, 1989 is a direct and appropriate hourly average of the
July 10th pre-publication data. By contrast, the finalized heavy water
data of July 13 cannot be obtained from the July 10 prepublication data
in a similar manner. Furthermore, Dr. Swartz has shown that no linear
transformation exists that successfully maps the July 10 heavy water
data into the final published data. This means that whatever technique
was used to create the final published data set was highly contrived,
that is, was manipulated to give the curve its final appearance. This is
in contrast to the impression that Professor Parker has given all along,
that the two data sets were treated either identically or in some kind of
equivalent manner.
Dr. Swartz uses “polite language” to characterize these findings. He
writes, “There appear to be the possibility that some of the data points in
the published heavy water curves are most likely artifact, rather than a
result of the original experimental data.” He states, “. .there does appear
to have been an asymmetric algorithm used when the July manuscripts
are examined. The light water curve was published essentially intact,
whereas the heavy water does appear shifted without any clear explanation
for the difference.” He writes of the heavy water data, “. . .the possibility
of additional superimposed components cannot be excluded. . .” and
“. . .much would be clarified by the marking of incidental, questionable,
or less clearly derived data points.”
I will not be so polite. To be blunt: Dr. Swartz’s findings mean that it
is absolutely certain that the heavy water experiment data have been
manipulated, adulterated, and presented in a way that is completely
misleading. I no longer characterize as scientific misconduct what I formerly
believed to be an unwarranted shifting down of a data curve,
which was a serious enough charge itself. I now consider that an individual
or individuals responsible for the preparation of that data are
guilty of scientific fraud. I am using the term fraud, which connotes in
my mind a deliberate attempt to mislead, to correspond with the definition
of “misconduct” in “Section 50.102 Definitions of Sub-Part A, Section
493 of the Public Health Service Act.” Furthermore, I would consider
any significant delay in dealing appropriately and severely with
these findings to be an attempt to cover up scientific fraud.
Some further conclusions that one can reasonably infer from Dr.
Swartz’s findings: The artifactual time-calibration mark is alluded to in
the PFC Journal of Fusion Energy paper in Figure 6— in the context of the
description of the declining heater power curve. There is no such
description in the previous figure in which the data is presented, Figure
5, nor could there have been, since it would obviously have been ludicrous
to insert points that look like data and then say, “by the way, they
are not really data, they are calibration points.” I suggest that these
points seem to enhance the impression of a wider y-axis data spread—
50 Infinite Energy • ISSUE 24, 1999 • MIT Special Report