Re: MOST IMPORTANT FOSSIL (A human skull as old as coal!)

Paul Myers (myers@netaxs.com)
Sat, 02 Nov 1996 16:53:48 -0500

In article <327bb343.497675@news.easynet.co.uk>, ian@knowledge.co.uk (Ian
Tresman) wrote:

> "Michael D. Painter" <mpainter@maxinet.com> wrote:
>
> >That hardly applies here. Had Scientific American gone to the site, watched
> >the flight, and then published the above their might be a comparison.
> >Conrad has had his rocks investigated by a number of people, people HE
> >picked.
> >How many such incidents have occurred since 1906? That was a while back.
>
> Yes Scientific American could have gone to the site, but didn't. Yes,
> it may have been a while back. A more recent example is cold fusion
> where Pons and Fleischmann were accused of all manner of crimes in the
> press. Yet Eneco now have a European patent on Pons-Fleischmann
> technology.
>

That's a jaundiced reading of recent history. I was there at the U of Utah
when Pons & Fleischmann made their announcement (I worked in the biology
building, right next door to chemistry). Remember that P&F published this
stuff in Science and Nature -- that doesn't sound like any kind of
suppression by the scientific establishment. The initial tone of all
the early reports was cautious, dubious optimism and curiousity. There was
definitely a much more openly encouraging attitude by the press than you
imply!

That attitude did become more hostile fairly quickly, I will admit. The
reason for that, though, was that everybody had serious problems replicating
the experiment, and P&F were not at all forthcoming with useful protocols.
And I saw the U of Utah sink quite a bit of money into that pit before they
got forced out of the business by some ethical improprieties with diversions
of funds (not by P&F, but by over-enthusiastic members of the U administration).

And yes, they may have a patent, but that is meaningless. I don't see anyone
heating their homes, powering their cars, or even running a transistor radio
off the P&F technology.

-- 

Paul Myers                               Department of Biology

myers@netaxs.com                         Temple University

http://fishnet.bio.temple.edu/           Philadelphia, PA 19122