Just to launch a discussion and reveal yet another academic example of behavior, I fall on that newslette by Steven Krivit "Federal Investigations Reveal Academic Backstabbing at Purdue University." http://us7.campaign-archive2.com/?u=efa1558ece17e946d64fd9a89&id=cf8ef248b2&e=fb001f8a52
I don't know about that affair, but the way people are condemned without evidence, remind me Bockris affair. times to burns the dissenters, their journal... and not only in LENR. something is rotten in the real of academics, as Taleb moans. It seems structural, linked to the way power is distributed in academic structures. I am convinces academic struture of government funded research, of peer-reviewed decisions, lead necessarily to Mutual Assured Delusion which lead to dissenters assasination, self-censorship, pal-review, books burning, maybe Taleyarkhan is guilty (can you explain me what could be the motivation of clear fraud), but is ther any evidence? meanwhile le MIT failed replication showed clear misconduct and was never punished on the opposite. "The report is about the controversy surrounding Rusi Taleyarkhan, a professor in the Purdue University School of Nuclear Engineering, and his research. Taleyarkhan has said that his group's nuclear cavitation research may lead to a new carbon-free clean-energy technology, yet it has never been independently replicated. The research is sometimes called sonofusion or bubble fusion. In 2002, he and five colleagues at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory claimed that they were the first group to experimentally demonstrate and confirm the long-predicted phenomenon of nuclear reactions in cavitating liquids. According to independent audits performed by Oak Ridge peers Dan Shapria, Michael Saltmarsh and Michael Murray, they succeeded. The experiments were replicated by a team at Purdue in 2003, with some help from Taleyarkhan. Another team at Purdue replicated the results in 2005, and the experiments were also demonstrated in 2006 in front of a DARPA-sponsored review team. According to witnesses at that review, Taleyarkhan succeeded. Nevertheless, academic peers and competitors of Taleyarkhans coordinated to make accusations against him of research misconduct and/or fraud. Through multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, New Energy Times has obtained inter-university correspondence and documents from federal investigations revealing that Eugenie Reich, a freelance journalist writing for Nature's news service, conspired with Lefteri Tsoukalas, at the time the head of the Purdue University School of Nuclear Engineering. Reich also collaborated with physicist Seth Putterman at the University of California, Los Angeles, and chemist Kenneth Suslick at the University of Illinois. All four of them sent allegations to Holly Adams, at the time the inspector general of the U.S. Office of Naval Research, claiming that Taleyarkhan had committed research misconduct and, in some cases, fraud. Yet, after several years of extensive and costly federally mandated investigations, no evidence of fraud was found. In response to pressure from the media, the inspector general, and Congress, a Purdue University committee, under the direction of an outside law firm, eventually created two specious allegations of research misconduct and adjudicated those same allegations against Taleyarkhan. Meanwhile, some of his accusers - fellow scientists - manipulated and withheld their own confirmatory data, misled the media, and misled federal investigators to advance their own diverse agendas. In response to investigations by New Energy Times, three federal offices conducted their own investigations. On Monday, we will report for the first time that documents obtained over the course of several years by New Energy Times from the federal government in response to FOIA requests show that Adams inappropriately collaborated with Tsoukalas. The Department of Defense put Adams on administrative leave, revoked her security clearance, and later reassigned her and reinstated her clearance. By that time, Purdue had forced Tsoukalas to resign as the head of the School of Nuclear Engineering. Taleyarkhan remains a professor in the school; however, Purdue has not rescinded most of its sanctions against him. His research has ground to a halt, and his reputation remains tainted by the accusations of fraud. Steven B. Krivit Publisher and Senior Editor New Energy Times "
