Sunday, March 25, 2007

More Follow-up on the "Bubble Fusion Fiasco Isn't Over"

I wrote earlier about the Bob Park report that a member of the US House of Representative has asked Purdue University for the report on its review of Taleyarkhan misconduct accusations. Thanks to the comment by Lawrence B. Ebert to my blog entry, I have found the New York Times article that reported on the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee request that was sent to Purdue's President.


A university spokesman, Joseph Bennett, said, "Purdue’s plan is to work with the committee, with the intention of providing them everything that they’ve requested."


I can only hope that this report is made public, because heaven knows, it certainly isn't coming willingly from Purdue. Like I said earlier, if Purdue thinks they can put this issue to sleep by simply depriving everyone from the necessary information, they have seriously underestimated the issue and overestimated the perception of their integrity.

Zz.

2 comments:

Lawrence B. Ebert said...

As a followup, I have posted on IPBiz a link to the letter written by Congressman Brad Miller to Purdue. One can see why Purdue decided to respond by March 30.
That does NOT mean this information will become public. The letter of Miller is significant apart from the context of bubble fusion.

In a different vein, please note that the initial article in Nature was by a free-lance reporter (Eugenie Reich), who also had questioned actions by David Baltimore concerning a stem cell patent. Please also note the origin of the UCLA funding.

Simon Templar said...

Follow the money: DARPA gives $800,000 to UCLA (Putterman) for a new neutron detector and to attempt a replication of Taleyarkhan's experiment. $200,000 goes to Purdue for Taleyarkhan to help Putterman do a replication. Putterman failed to replicate. Of COURSE it wouldn't be Putterman's fault, right? Must be the originator's fault, sure. Now why is it that up until the time Putterman took DARPA's money, and attempted a replication of the Taleyarkhan work, was this $1M money well-spent? Putterman didn't have a problem with cashing DARPA'S check, so why is he sending his pit bull Miller after Purdue now, if not to deflect the attention away from his own failure, his scam to purchase a new instrument for UCLA for his other fusion research, to minimalize his competitor Taleyarkhan in the fight for scarce government funding as well as his to denigrate the competition for intellectual primacy in the decade-long battle for bubble fusion? Things that make you go hmmmm.