See: http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/blog/2014/02/24/how-academia-and-publishing-are-destroying-scientific-innovation-a-conversation-with-sydney-brenner/
Someone posted a link to LENR-CANR in this article, which brought it to my attention. This is an interview with "Professor Sydney Brenner, a professor of Genetic medicine at the University of Cambridge and Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine in 2002." His experiences sound a lot like what happened in cold fusion, except it has a happy ending much sooner. Here are some quotes from the interview: "What people don't realise is that at the beginning, it was just a handful of people who saw the light, if I can put it that way. So it was like belonging to an evangelical sect, because there were so few of us, and all the others sort of thought that there was something wrong with us. They weren't willing to believe. Of course they just said, well, what you're trying to do is impossible. That's what they said about crystallography of large molecules. They just said it's hopeless. It's a hopeless task. And so what we were trying to do with the chemistry of proteins and nucleic acids looked hopeless for a long time. . . . I strongly believe that the only way to encourage innovation is to give it to the young. The young have a great advantage in that they are ignorant. Because I think ignorance in science is very important. If you're like me and you know too much you can't try new things. I always work in fields of which I'm totally ignorant. . . . Today the Americans have developed a new culture in science based on the slavery of graduate students. Now graduate students of American institutions are afraid. He just performs. He's got to perform. The post-doc is an indentured labourer. . . . [Sanger] wouldn't have survived [today]. It is just the fact that he wouldn't get a grant today because somebody on the committee would say, oh those were very interesting experiments, but they've never been repeated. And then someone else would say, yes and he did it a long time ago, what's he done recently? And a third would say, to top it all, he published it all in an un-refereed journal. . . . I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. . . ." - Jed
