The safest course is to take Garwin and Lewis and the others at their word and to limit consideration to what was said and written. One can have one's suspicions about their genuine motives, but this is only speculation in the final analysis.
Remember that Pons's lawyer sent a stiff letter to Michael Salamon demanding a retraction of a paper by him and others at the University of Utah when they got a null result. That is not the normal behavior of academics working in an academic context. There was a series of exchanges between Pons and Fleischmann with a team at MIT establishing to nearly everyone's satisfaction that something funky had happened with the gamma spectrum that was submitted as one line of evidence for neutrons with the original 1989 note, as well as problems with a second peak that was provided as a replacement. Petrasso stuck to the explanation that they must have seen some kind of experimental artifact, but he was surely tempted to draw more serious conclusions. Pons and Fleischmann had used a health dosimeter to measure neutrons despite having had access, should they have wanted it, to faculty in the physics department who could have carried out the difficult measurements and determine whether there was artifact or not; Jones offered similar help, which they did not follow up on. Presumably Fleischmann and Pons were so concerned not to give away some important secret that they dared not involve anyone else, and instead carried out procedures of their own devising to look for evidence completely outside of their field, for it would have been slipshod indeed if it had simply not occurred to them to seek out help. There was a table in the 1989 paper in which values for the power they saw had been silently extrapolated onto a different scale from the relatively small values actually observed in the experiments to much larger ones. This silent extrapolation was only discovered later on by others after some investigative work. Pons and Fleischmann left off Marvin Hawkins as the third author of the paper, even though Hawkins had done a lot of the lab work on which the paper was based. Pons and Fleischmann announced their discovery at a news conference prior to having gone through any kind of peer review. They were very circumspect about how they had gotten their results, and there was insufficient information in their paper for others to really know all of what they had done. For the first few weeks, most people had to rely on faxes of the paper and on news clippings, because Pons and Fleischmann were intentionally hard to get information out of. Fleischmann, an electrochemist, suggested that the reason they were seeing the excess heat was that deuterium nuclei were being squeezed together due to the close spacing in the palladium lattice. Pons and Fleischmann tried to go directly to congress and get funding instead of going through the normal grant-making agencies, a step that was predictably perceived as underhanded. In retrospect, there are mitigating factors behind many of these details. But it is not hard to see how some of the more skeptical folks could draw the conclusion that Pons and Fleischmann were either up to something or at least were not careful in their work. Whatever happened in 1989, it was not normal, boring science. To my mind Pons and Fleischmann were uncareful and made some glaring mistakes, and this caught some scientific gatekeepers off guard. The latter reacted swiftly and harshly, and then found it hard to walk back their position when more evidence came to light. They had overreacted so much that to fully retract what they had said would be to risk their credibility in a field where mistakes are poorly tolerated. The conflict of interest that this situation gave rise to prevented them from pursuing the matter with enough vigor to ever fully convince themselves that they had jumped to conclusions. This might be dishonesty or a lack of integrity or something else very bad, or it might be normal human behavior. At the present time, each scientist is ultimately responsible for his or her own conclusions and has to make decisions about whether or not to look beyond all of the initial distractions. Eric
