Fusion verdict misconduct - University of California,.pdfVIP

Fusion verdict: misconduct : Nature News 9/9/08 5:53 PM Published online 22 July 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/454379a News Fusion verdict: misconduct Purdue committee upholds two charges. Eugenie Samuel Reich Nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan falsified the circumstances of high-profile experiments on bubble fusion, according to a Purdue University report released last week. The report by a Purdue committee that includes scientists from other institutes upheld two charges of research misconduct. Taleyarkhan’s work has been a source of controversy since 2002, when he claimed to have triggered nuclear fusion reactions by passing sound waves into a cell filled with deuterated acetone1 (#B1) . His work has been the subject of at least two inquiries by Purdue, which is based in West Lafayette, Indiana. But the latest one was run with oversight from a government agency, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in Arlington, Virginia, which funded some of the research under question. The report finds Taleyarkhan guilty of misconduct for citing a paper by junior researchers in his lab as if their work was an “independent” replication of his own findings. He is also found guilty of adding the name of a student who had not contributed to the paper as an author, apparently in order to counter a reviewer’s comment that the replication effort seemed to lack witnesses. The report stresses that corroborative information should be conveyed honestly, because reproducibility of results by independent experimenters is a crucial component of the scientific method. Although the report’s conclusion echoes “The committee concerns expressed2 (#B2) by Purdue clearly documents faculty in 2006, it leaves others that there has Rusi Taleyarkhan