Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [94]
Despite Taleyarkhan’s reservation, within a month of the show’s air date he and Putterman (along with Suslick) yoked themselves together with a grant from the Pentagon. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gave them more than $800,000 to try to replicate Taleyarkhan’s results. It was about that time that the murmurs about Taleyarkhan’s incompetence began turning to murmurs about scientific misconduct.
Lefteri Tsoukalas was one of the people at Purdue who helped recruit Taleyarkhan from Oak Ridge. He apparently began doubting Taleyarkhan’s integrity early in 2004, when the bubble fusion researcher first started working on campus full-time. Tsoukalas and five of his colleagues had been trying to replicate Taleyarkhan’s work without any success, and they hoped that Taleyarkhan could help them get the experiments running properly. But when Taleyarkhan arrived, Tsoukalas’s team was put off by his increasingly bizarre behavior. According to an exposé in Nature, Taleyarkhan allegedly started observing positive results that nobody else could detect: “He said: ‘Look, there’s a peak,’ but there was nothing to see,” one lab member told the magazine. “I started questioning it.” And then, in May 2004, apparently without warning, Taleyarkhan reportedly removed the bubble fusion equipment from the department’s lab. Though Tsoukalas and his colleagues were upset, they told Nature that they didn’t press the issue in the interest of faculty harmony. Then Taleyarkhan apparently argued against publication of the Tsoukalas group’s negative results. Yet, shortly after the Xu and Butt paper came out in 2005, Taleyarkhan is said to have pressed Purdue to issue the laudatory press release.
Soon, accusations started flying in the press that the Xu-Butt paper was not as independent as Taleyarkhan insisted, and Taleyarkhan soon found himself formally accused of scientific misconduct. In March 2006, Purdue University began an investigation into his actions, and the Xu-Butt research took center stage. Tsoukalas and a colleague, Martin Lopez de Bertodano, claimed that the Xu-Butt paper was “nothing but a contrived and hurried attempt to stage the appearance of ‘independent confirmation’ of sonofusion claims.”
Things got worse for Taleyarkhan by the day. More scientists joined the chorus crying fraud. Ken Suslick used the f-word in an interview with the Los Angeles Times when Nature first aired concerns about the Xu-Butt paper: “Presenting that as independent is fraud,” Suslick told them. And scientists had found other reasons to be concerned about Taleyarkhan’s conduct.
Earlier in 2006, a scientist in Putterman’s research group, Brian Naranjo, argued that Taleyarkhan’s data were consistent not with fusion reactions but with the radioactive decay of an element known as californium-252. (Taleyarkhan had been “negligent or jumped the gun or concocted data—one of those,” Putterman told the Los Angeles Times.) In May, Taleyarkhan’s group admitted that it had made an embarrassing error with a key piece of equipment; its detector was made of a material different from what had been reported. In December, Nature reported on allegations that “data from Xu’s paper are apparently identical to separate data reported by Taleyarkhan.” Taleyarkhan’s work was looking incompetent at best, and fraudulent at worst.74 Scientists were expressing their concerns to Purdue.
When Purdue wrapped up its investigation in December, after repeatedly being accused of foot-dragging, it initially kept the results secret. In February 2007 the university made them public.
Committee members had found a number of disturbing issues. They concluded that the Xu and Butt research was not independent after all. Taleyarkhan’s involvement in the work was consistent with that of a coauthor. In fact, his contribution was arguably greater than Adam Butt’s. Consequently, the committee deemed that when Taleyarkhan kept his name off the paper, he showed “a severe lack of judgment.” Despite this, the committee concluded in December 2006 that