Con-Fusion Illusions: Frauds, False Trails, and Fanatics
Maybe there is something in Michigan’s water that encourages teenage atomic inventors. What young Michigander David Hahn accomplished with breeder reactors in 1995, 17-year-old Thiago Olson did, with much greater success and sophistication, a dozen years later. With some $3,500 in equipment, a year of research and a year in construction, Olson built a working “fusor,” a desk-top device that demonstrates the most sought-after aspect of nuclear energy since the discover of atom splitting: fusion energy.
Truth be told, Olson with his limited budget came as close as hundreds of physicists and engineers, equipped with hundreds of millions of government dollars and endless access to technical advice and support, have ever come to harnessing the power of the thermonuclear explosion into a tame device for making electricity. The tale of fusion energy is one of a failure of science and engineering. Unfortunately, it is also a tale of crime, contempt and confusion.
Popular Science magazine commented that Olson has joined a “club of fewer than 20 amateurs in the world who are known to have created fusors, tabletop machines that fuse atoms to produce energy. There’s no risk of a mushroom cloud -- the machine creates barely enough energy to heat a cup of coffee, and radiation officials in Michigan (where Olson lives) have already deemed it safe.” In 2008, a Wall Street Journal article said that only 42 hobbyists have qualified for membership in the “Neutron Club” by building fusors, allowing them to wear T-shirts reading: “Fusion – been there…done that.” Thiago Olson is among them.
Olson’s machine was built on research originally done in the 1920s and 1930s by one of America’s most import and least known inventors, a largely self-taught Mormon polymath with the incongruous name of Philo T. Farnsworth (1906-1971). In the 1920s, barely out of high school, Farnsworth invented television. Work he did with vacuum tubes during this period led him, in the 1960s, to create the first device to demonstrate the controlled fusing of two atoms of hydrogen, releasing a great amount of energy in the process.
While the fusor is an interesting and highly useful device, its demonstration of fusion is a bit of an illusion. As is the case with more sophisticated machines costing millions of times more than Olson’s device, the fusor requires far more energy to work than it creates. There’s the rub.
If breeder reactors were the nation’s visionary approach to the limits of uranium, fusion was the hallucinatory path. Over more than a half century, the U.S. alone has spent tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on fusion research, developing ever larger and more complex machines designed to harness the power of the sun. Over that period, the prospects of success have receded further into the future. When atomic scientists first started touted the promise of practical fusion energy in the early 1950s, they said it was 25 years away. A 2006 editorial judgment in New Scientist magazine noted that “if commercial fusion is viable, it may well be a century away.” That may be wildly optimistic and controlling fusion may simply be beyond the abilities of mankind.
The promise of essentially endless energy from fusion has bewitched many for decades. Then Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Glenn Seaborg, in a 1969 speech, said, “Fission through breeders will supply us with energy for centuries or perhaps thousands of years. But, with the successful use of controlled fusion, man will have a virtually unlimited energy resource at hand. Even at a power consumption rate many times that of today, he will have an energy reserve that will last for millions of years.”
The physical basis of fusion energy is well understood, and has been graphically demonstrated with the terrifying power of the hydrogen bomb, a device that fuses hydrogen atoms. The physics is simple: two hydrogen atoms fuse together to produce a helium atom, releasing a great deal of energy in the process. This is what powers our sun and the process that Stan Ulam and Edward Teller were able to barely harness in the 1950s to create their “thermonuclear” bomb, using a conventional fission explosion to build the heat and pressure necessary from the hydrogen atoms to come together reluctantly and explosively.
Solving the problems of the H-bomb was a daunting endeavor, one of the greatest scientific challenges that had faced mankind to that point. And the promise of the reaction – a source of almost unimaginable and endless energy – was the stuff of dreams. Hydrogen and helium are the most common elements in the universe. If science could harness them, control them for the peaceful purpose of turning heat into electricity, mankind would possess all the energy it could ever conceivably use. Scientists, egos pumped up by their successes in the Manhattan Project, and convinced that uranium, even with breeder reactors, was ultimately a limited resource, were certain they could solve the enormous riddle.
The problem of fusion centers on the forces of atoms. An enormously strong force binds atoms together. The poets of physics call it “the strong force.” Overcoming this atomic glue is the only way fusion can work. Edward Teller well understood the difficulties. In 1962, Teller told a symposium on nuclear energy, “In 1951 and 1952, when thermonuclear power produced the first hydrogen bomb, we were asked: ‘It is clear that fusion can be used in war. What about using fusion in peace. It is the same reaction, isn't it?’
“Well, it is the same reaction, but that's not what counts. It is easy to blow up something; it is much more difficult to make it react at a slow and controllable rate. Green fire saved Constantinople from the Moslems more than a thousand years ago, and a millennium had to elapse before this chemical energy became usable in a controlled fashion.”
When the fusion quest first heated up after World War II, a sudden scientific lightning bolt across the horizon made fusion look absurdly simple. As it turned out, only the first word of that construction – absurd – applied. Simple was never in the cards.
On a Saturday, March 24, 1951, Argentine president Juan Domingo Peron made a startling announcement in Buenos Aires. With the Argentine press corps hanging on his words, Peron said, “On February 16, 1951, in the atomic energy pilot plant on Huemul Island at San Carlos de Bariloche, thermonuclear experiments were carried out under conditions of control on a technical scale.”
Argentina, Peron claimed, had solved the problem of controlled fusion, well before the U.S. or the Soviet Union were able to release an uncontrolled reaction in its “Super” or hydrogen thermonuclear bomb. While the Americans and the Russians were playing with the swords of war, Argentina, Peron said, was working on peaceful fusion energy. Accompanying Peron at the announcement was a 42-year-old Austria physicist, Ronald Richter. He had close ties to former Nazis who had emigrated to neutral Argentina as the war was ending badly for the Third Reich, and who were advising Peron on scientific issues. The authoritarian dictator and former Army officer was enamored of fascism, including the achievements of German science. Peron backed the Austrian completely, turning over the island half a mile off shore of Lake Nahuel Huapi in northern Patagonia.
Peron’s announcement was a sensation. The front page of the Sunday, March 25, New York Times proclaimed, “PERON ANNOUNCES NEW WAY TO MAKE ATOM YIELD POWER, Reports Argentina Has Devised Thermonuclear Reaction That Does Not Use Uranium, TESTS HELD SUCCESSFUL, Method Likened to the Sun’s – Skepticism Shown by U.S. Officials and Experts.” Time magazine in its April 2 edition, discussed with typical snarkiness, “Peron’s Atom.” Time quoted Ralph Lapp, an experienced physicist and always perceptive atomic observer, who said he knew the secret ingredient in Argentina’s fusion reaction: “It’s baloney.”
Lapp was right, as unfolding events over the next several months demonstrated. The Times on March 27 reported on the skepticism of the scientific establishment toward the Peron project. George Gamow at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., one of the true pioneers of atomic power, said he didn’t believe the Argentines could have come up with a way to contain the enormous temperatures – millions of degrees – needed to force the reluctant hydrogen atoms together.
Peron’s project collapsed quickly. The Times reported from Buenos Aires on December 5, 1952, “Argentina’s atomic energy project has exploded with the force of a bursting soap bubble, it appeared today. According to engineers who had been engaged on the top secret project, all 300 workers in Argentina’s atomic energy pilot plant on Huemel Island at San Carlos de Bariloche have been dismissed. The same sources said that the Austrian-born scientist, Ronald Richter, who was in charge of the project, had been placed under arrest three weeks ago.” A photo accompanying the article showed Peron, with his famous wife Eva in the background, pinning a medal on the double-chinned Richter in 1951.
While Peron’s announcement – which Time dubbed “the baloney bomb” – proved to be empty of scientific content, it had the effect of jump-starting fusion energy research programs in both the U.S. and Russia. As fusion historian Robin Herman wrote, “Not long after Peron’s boast, a full-scale program to build a genuine fusion energy reactor in the United States was quietly born.” That was “Project Sherwood,” which ran from 1951 to 1959 in the shadows of the ever-secretive Atomic Energy Commission, the predecessor to a massive, 60-year U.S. and international government program that has consumed enormous amounts of dollars, pounds, francs, and Euros and produced no useful energy. The key to the U.S. program was concocted by Princeton physicist Lyman Spitzer, a donut-shaped device called a “Stellerator.”
The reaction in the Soviet Union was nearly identical to that of the United States. As in the U.S., Soviet scientists had been working on the problems of hydrogen bombs when Peron’s baloney bomb ignited in Buenos Aires. Learning of Peron’s announcement, Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Russian atomic program, immediately contacted Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s scheming science advisor, who convened a committee to formulate a response. The result was an order from Stalin on May 1, 1951, formally establishing a high-level U.S.S.R. fusion program.
The Soviet approach to handling the enormous temperatures and atomic forces in the plasma needed to force hydrogen to combine into helium was a magnetic donut known as a “toroidal kamera magnetic” or Tokamak. Tokamaks would dominate worldwide fusion research for the next 60 years. Britain was also pursuing fusion energy, coming up with the same notion of using the geometry of the torus to control the fierce forces, building partly on ideas supplied by Russian emigree George Gamow, who eventually ended up in the U.S.
Historian Herman summarized the international efforts. “In many respects, then, the Russian fusion work paralleled the effort by Lyman Spitzer – and efforts simultaneously under way at Britain’s Harwell lab. Each nation was traveling a similar path, and the pace of research was virtually identical thanks to the sparking action of Peron’s incredible speech.”
It’s not the purpose of this account to describe the details of the endless, feckless search for useful energy in the collision of atoms of the fundamental element hydrogen. That’s a book-length tale in itself, and well told in Charles Seife’s “Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking.” As Seife points out, current fusion research and development activities look very much like a dead end.
For many years, the general thrust of the international effort has been to develop Tokamaks to try to capture the forces of the reaction on donut-shaped, magnetic bottles. Tokamaks are probably a false trail. Also working behind the veil of national security has been a well-funded U.S. approach using lasers focused on a tiny pellet of hydrogen to induce fusion. The locus of that effort has been the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. But that project is unlikely to produce useful energy, operating mostly as a job training project for rookie atomic weapons designers.
The most interesting aspect of fusion is the cranks, con artists, and fanatics it seems to attract. In the words of science writer Seife, “Over and over again, the dream of fusion energy has driven scientists to lie, to break their promises, and to deceive their peers. Fusion can bring even the best physicists to the brink of the abyss. Not all of them return.”
Two scientists, chemists not physicists, who passed the point of no return in March 1989 were Martin Fleischmann of the U.K. and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah. Almost exactly 38 years after Juan Peron’s fusion announcement in Buenos Aires, Fleischman and Pons burst onto the scene, first through well-placed leaks to the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, and then, on March 23, a press conference at the University of Utah. The two electrochemists – Fleischman, 61, a renowned member of the Royal Society and Pons, 46, his hard-working disciple – told the world they had done what many would regard as impossible. They had capture fusion in a bottle. Their discovery, they said, would revolutionize the world by providing easy, cheap, endless power based on deuterium, the naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen that was plentiful and readily available in seawater.
The announcement was an international sensation. The two chemists had used simple materials – a rubber tub, some palladium and platinum, heavy water, and a battery – to produce heat. They said their device, which was built on the ability of the metal palladium to absorb and concentrate hydrogen atoms, yielded more energy than it used. The reaction required none of the bugaboos of traditional fusion, the stupendously high temperatures and notoriously unstable plasmas that resulted. If Fleischmann and Pons were legit, they had changed civilization forever.
The U.S. press reacted quickly. The Wall Street Journal, which had benefitted from the leak to science reporter Jerry Bishop, who became an acolyte for the two chemists, had a hyped up, although entirely accurate, headline on its page 1 story: TAMING H-BOMBS? TWO SCIENTISTS CLAIM BREAKTHROUGH IN QUEST FOR FUSION ENERGY. IF VERIFIED, UTAH EXPERIMENT PROMISES TO POINT THE WAY TO A VAST SOURCE OF POWER.
The other major U.S. papers were substantially more circumspect. The New York Times ran the story on the front page, but with a cautious headline: NUCLEAR POWER GAIN REPORTED BUT EXPERTS EXPRESS DOUBTS. Science reporter Malcolm Browne quoted unnamed scientists who were skeptical of Pons and Fleischmann, pointing to the lack of any documentation or details in their Utah press release. The Washington Post headline for its story on Page 3 was cautious: SIMPLE TEST SUSTAINED FUSION, SCIENTISTS SAY. PHYSICISTS DOUBTFUL OF PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS. The paper’s Phil Hilts noted, “Other scientists expressed doubts about the work, however, and one physicist familiar with it said the announcement was ‘blown far out of proportion.’”
But the general impression of the cold fusion work sped ahead of the reportorial caution. A special meeting of the American Chemical Society convened in Dallas, Texas, April 12 was a sensation. The Times headlined, 7,000 SCIENTISTS CHEER FUSION-IN-JAR EXPERIMENTER as Pons made a hyperbolic presentation, devoid of much detail. The demand for tickets for the Pons presentation was so high that the ACS had to move the session to the Dallas Convention Center. The meeting was billed as the “Woodstock of cold fusion.” The cold fusion session turned into a pep rally for chemists, who vociferously expressed what they perceived as a triumph over the haughty physicists, who believed they were the only ones who could do real science. Reporter Malcolm Brown wrote that the cold fusion experiment “has opened a schism between chemists and physicists that may take years of experimentation to resolve.”
It didn’t take years, only months. As the chemists were parading their triumph, including a high-profile hearing in Washington at the House Science and Technology Committee, where the University of Utah sought $25 million to continue cold fusion research. the scientific community was subjecting the work to withering scrutiny. The two cold fusioneers were remarkably reluctant to reveal the data behind their work or to collaborate with others attempting to replicate the experiment. As weeks passed, the glow around for Pons and Fleischmann got progressively dimmer as scientists were unable to find the neutrons or the tritium that would be telltale artifacts of a true fusion reaction.
The day after the Dallas extravaganza, the White House called former Atomic Energy Commission Glenn Seaborg (a chemist) at the University of California at Berkeley, asking him to brief President George H.W. Bush and his chief of staff, John H. Sununu, a PhD mechanical engineer and nuclear power enthusiast, on cold fusion. On April 14 in Washington, Seaborg expressed skepticism to Bush, Sununu, and Adm. James Watkins, the secretary of energy. Seaborg suggested a scientific panel to review the research and make recommend on future federal funding.
That review group, an unassailable assembly of some of the finest minds in physics and chemistry, carefully reviewed the work of Pons and Fleischmann and the fruitless attempts to replicate their alleged breakthrough. One of the members of the panel was Dick Garwin, a legendary former thermonuclear weapons designer now at IBM. Another was Princeton physicist Will Happer, head of the JASON group of scientists which advised government on science policy. Garwin and Happer would later show up to debunk another fusion fraud.
The federal cold fusion review group poured cold water on Pons and Fleischmann. The Salt Lake City Deseret News characterized it as giving the Utah work “the cold shoulder.” On July 12, the panel released an “interim” report, concluding that the Utah experiments “do not present convincing evidence that cold fusion exists.” That effectively ended the cold fusion furor, and a final report at the end of October, recommending against federal funding of the research, added further to the demise of enthusiasm for cold fusion.
But the practical demise of the work of Fleischmann and Pons did not mean an end to high-profile false trails in fusion energy, as the flap over the “bubble fusion” research of Rusi Taleyarkhan demonstrated. The affair, with odd resonances of Pons and Fleischmann, began with a paper Oak Ridge National Laboratory engineer Taleyarkhan submitted to the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal Science in 2002. The research claimed to demonstrate nuclear fusion in a tabletop device through a well-known phenomenon involving tiny, energetic bubbles in a liquid, caused by sound waves, a phenomenon known as “sonoluminescense.” Noted physicist Luis Alvarez had speculated on the possibility of “bubble fusion” decades before, but no one had been able to demonstrate the phenomenon.
Taleyarkhan, born in India, had earned advanced degrees, including a PhD in nuclear engineering, from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, along with an MBA. He was a productive and respected researcher at the Energy Department’s weapons lab. A recent search in the DOE database found 152 citations in which Taleyarkhan was either the lead author or one of the named authors.
As the article was in review, where it passed peer muster, and in preparation for publication, a huge internal battle was raging. Fearful of the residue of the cold fusion fiasco, Oak Ridge commissioned two of its researchers to replicate Taleyarkhan’s research. They failed to find the telltale neutrons. But Science had already accepted the paper for publication, and editor Don Kennedy wasn’t about to withdraw it, although the objections from Oak Ridge put a delay in the scheduled publication.
During this process, IBM’s Garwin and Princeton’s Happer had taken a look at Taleyarkhan’s work and the Oak Ridge experiments that failed to confirm it. Their judgment was harsh: Taleyarkhan’s work had no merit. They pressured Kennedy to pull the article. He resisted what he viewed as Oak Ridge questioning his journal’s integrity and his judgment as editor.
The article appeared in Science in March, caused a brief spike of science hype in the general public, and then largely disappeared into the miasma of old news. Taleyarkhan left Oak Ridge and took a prestigious post at Purdue University, where he continued to work on bubble fusion and publish papers, including a 2004 article in Physical Review E, an important peer-reviewed journal. But that was not the end of it.
In 2005, the BBC produced a documentary that recounted Taleyarkhan’s work and hired UCLA physicist Seth Putterman, an expert in sonoluminescense, who had been a peer reviewer of the work for Science and recommended against publication. He failed to find neutrons for the BBC and Taleyarkhan looked ludicrous.
About that time, doubts were surfacing about Taleyarkhan’s research and methodology. Purdue researchers in 2004 had failed to reproduce Taleyarkhan’s work. In March 2006, Nature demolished Taleyarkhan’s work in a news article, raising the specter of scientific fraud. Subsequent investigations by Purdue concluded that their researcher had engaged in “research misconduct” by claiming that there had been independent verification of his research, when he had in fact directed the work and attempted to fool reviewers about its veracity. Perdue demoted him, although he remains on the university faculty. Seife concluded that Taleyarkhan “threw his career away chasing after the hope of unlimited fusion power.”
The final tale of the fruitless search for fusion energy has even greater touches of tragedy. It may end with a former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist serving time in a federal prison. It may also prove to be another lesson in the dangerous tendencies of the U.S. atomic energy establishment to conflate dissent with treason. Ironically, the subject of this sad story, P. Leonardo Mascheroni, was born in Argentina, and was 16 at the time dictator Juan Peron announced his fusion fraud.
Mascheroni came to the U.S. in 1963 to study physics at the University of California at Berkeley. He earned a doctorate and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1972. He went to work at the Energy Department’s historic Los Alamos weapons laboratory in 1979, where he worked on inertial confinement fusion, the weapons-related approach to fusion using lasers to bombard a pellet of heavy hydrogen to initiate the fusion reaction. Most of the work on this technology is being done at DOE’s Livermore weapons laboratory in California, but Los Alamos has had a piece of the multi-billion-dollar project. Mascheroni’s wife Marjorie worked at Los Alamos as a technical writer and editor.
Mascheroni became convinced that the fusion program was on the wrong track, a view he shared widely within the DOE weapons establishment. He believed the project had miscalculated the size of the laser needed to initiate fusion; a much bigger laser would be needed. Mascheroni was an irritant and, as often happens, the irritated body expelled the irritant. He was laid off in 1988, during a Los Alamos restructuring, but his wife stayed on.
At that point, Mascheroni became a public whistleblower, a despised species within the atomic weapons cult. Working from his Los Alamos home, Mascheroni deluged outside scientists and Congress, as well as willing listeners among the media, with documentation and argument. Among the missives was a 319-page letter to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2003.
Mascheroni won some converts. Former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, R. James Woolsey, aided him in promoting his ideas. According to one press account, Los Alamos officials thought he was spying for Argentina, but the Federal Bureau of Investigations found no credible evidence. Nonetheless, Mascheroni refused to shut up, so he remained on the security radar screen of the FBI and the energy department. An angry Mascheroni allegedly threatened to turn the information he had about laser fusion over to a foreign government
In 2008, the FBI set up a sting operation, with an agent pretending to be from the Venezuelan government persuading Mascheroni to provide him with the details of the Los Alamos program. Mascheroni produced a 132-page package for the FBI agent. In October 2009, the FBI raided the Mascheroni home. The same day, Marjorie was fired from Los Alamos. A year later, a federal grand jury indicted the Mascheronis on 22 felony counts, including conspiracy, “attempting to participate in the development of an atomic weapon,” and misuse of restricted data. Further legal action was pending as this was written. Mascheroni and his wife could face lift in prison, and he is currently detained in a halfway house in Albuquerque.
For his part, Mascheroni says he is innocent. When the FBi raided his house, he told the Albuquerque Journal, “I would have left this country already if I were a spy. Spies do not take their case in front of Congress, and they don’t leave all their files and computers and everything here for the FBI to just come and take.” Retired Livermore physicist Hugh DeWitt told the San Diego Union-Tribune following the raid, “The FBI action is stupid and foolish and misguided and utterly wrong. There’s nothing classified or secret in this at all. His files are big papers, letters and mission statements. There’s nothing whatever that would endanger national security.”
Unfortunately, the Mascheroni case has some of the odor of the false case Los Alamos and the FBI brought against Chinese-American physicist Wen Ho Lee. DOE accused Lee, who was born in Taiwan, of passing classified information to Chinese government officials. The FBI indicted him on 59 various counts and he spent nine months in solitary confinement before the case collapsed. Ultimately, Lee entered a guilty plea to one charge of mishandling information, was released from prison, and won a personal apology from President Bill Clinton. The government had to admit that the information Lee had in his possession was not classified, but “restricted,” a much lower security category. It may well turn out that the indictment of Leo Marscheroni is a fraudulent as the case against Wen Ho Lee.
Ronald Richter, who conned Juan Peron, was a faker, a fraud. Pons and Fleischmann were legitimate scientists who lost their way, seduced by fame and the prospects of fortune and unwilling to acknowledge failure. They ended up as frauds. Taleyarkhan was stubborn, although he tried to cooperate at first. But he, too, was seduced by the fusion illusion into fraudulent behavior. Mascheroni was a scientist who never understood the need not to rock the boat. He pushed too hard, was a pain in the neck. He may turn out to have been a spy and a traitor, but it is more likely he was a fanatic and another victim of the enthusiasm for an energy source that may turn out to have been fraudulent from the start.
 Farnsworth engaged in a long, ultimately successful, court battle with RCA over the origin of TV during the 1930s. During his lifetime, Farnsworth had 300 successful patents. As one of his disciples once said, Farnsworth didn’t write for professional and technical journals. He communicated through his patent applications. The U.S. Postal Service in 1983 issued a 20 cents Farnsworth commemorative stamp.
 Also originally from Michigan. Go figure.
 Peron banned the foreign press from his announcement, but released an English translation of his announcement. The world press also quickly digested and rewrote the dispatches from the Argentine media.
 Argentina, as was the case in World War I, proclaimed neutrality in World War II, but, with the outcome clear, in late March 1945, declared war on the Axis powers. By that time, Argentina had already become a refuge for fleeing Nazi officers and officials.
 While Richter has become mostly a historical footnote, he left a bizarre artistic legacy. His peculiar life in Argentina inspired an opera written by Mario Lorenzo and Esteban Buch, titled Richter: Opera Documental de Camara. It has been performed in Argentina’s Teatro Colon and Theatre Paris-Dillete in France.
 Eva Peron died in Buenos Aires on July 26, 1952, at age 33, and was the inspiration of movies, musicals, and operas memorializing her classic “rags-to-riches” tale.
 A fine blow-by-blow history of the cold fusion furor is told by science writer Gary Taubes in “Bad Science, The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion.”
 I covered cold fusion for a trade newspaper, The Energy Daily. On March 24, I talked to Robert Park, the Washington representative for the American Physical Society and a physics professor at the University of Maryland. His reaction to the cold fusion press conference was scornful. “Not peer reviewed,” he told me.
 Later a New York Times science reporter.
 One of the lobbyists the university hired to push its case was Ira Magaziner, who later became a key aide in the Clinton administration, working with First Lady Hillary Clinton on her failed health insurance initiative. The university also hired Cassidy & Associates, a Washington lobbying group that specialized in winning congressional spending earmarks, particularly for universities that wanted to avoid the peer review processes of the federal science agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
 The only full account of the Taleyarkhan affair can be found in Seife’s “Sun in a Bottle.” Seife was a reporter for the Science news section at the time, and intimately involved in covering, and uncovering, the story.