Comment by suprgeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by suprgeek | Hacker News Reader

This post takes the lead-in with the Felisa Wolfe-Simon "Arsenic DNA" paper. In recent times I remember this was one of the most Hyped-up papers something akin to the Cold fusion paper by Fleischmann and Pons.

The contrast in the public response to the two incidents is fascinating. While Cold-fusion became a career-ender for anybody associated with it and Fleischmann & Pons both suffered pretty much banishment, repeated experiments have shown that there is something funny going on with that particular mix of compounds (Heavy water, Palladium, Nickel etc) - excess heat.

With arsenic life however, follow-up experiments have proven that it was contamination that was a cause of the result. So there is NO ARSENIC based life. Yet the lead authors of pretty much a gigantic false claim -orchestrated shamelessly by NASA- seem to be doing pretty well, dodging the basic questions with that most famous catch-all - more work is needed (hence more money should be sent my way) to prove the (bogus) claims made.

It saddens me that all the replies to your post are nit-picking over the cold fusion side. I never heard that the arsenic-based life paper had been discredited or had anything wrong with it until I saw this link.

The main point is that someone working at Science wrote a bunch of fake papers and ascribed them to fake African scientists (which bugs me a lot, since it might both assume and create discrimination) and showed that a bunch of open access journals don't do peer review properly but he didn't do the same thing to the conventional journals.

Where's the control group?

Any scientist will tell you over drinks about peers who double-publish, fake data, and force anyone whose work they review to cite their own work. I'm reminded of the scandalous story (in the New Yorker a few years ago, sorry no link) of a famous -- Fields Medallist no less -- mathematician who took over a journal and started publishing his own and disciples' work without review to get the jump on rivals -- and does a science get more assumed credit for perfection than Math?

> excess heat

There is no excess heat, it's measurement error caused by miscalculating how much hydrogen recombines in the cell.

If you build a calorimeter that recombines all hydrogen you find no excess (but it's really hard to do accurately).

And, even more tellingly, there are no fusion neutrons emitted.

That's not very telling when what they were claiming was aneutronic fusion.

The Pons / Fleischmann claims about their "cold fusion" experiment had nothing to do with aneutronic fusion. In fact, the definitive debunking of their claims consisted in the failure of other labs, and of P & F themselves, to detect fusion byproducts, including the expected neutrons: http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/science/050399s...

cold fusion wasn't a complete career-ender. There are people who do replicate the experiment to probe the phenomenon they discovered.

Their mistake wasn't the paper; it was the press conference.

Well they did get fame!! And Macromedia used to have a Product by that name :P Cold Fusion!

It was also the code name of the Power Mac 8100.

Cold Fusion gelato:

http://coldfusiongelato.com/site/home/

Mmm

The cold-fusion story reminds me of the physician who pioneered antiseptic procedures, and the reaction of the medical community to his publication [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

The very first sentence in the section about the response from the medical community:

> One of the first to respond to Semmelweis's 1848 communications was James Young Simpson who wrote a stinging letter. Simpson surmised that the English obstetrical literature must be totally unknown in Vienna, or Semmelweis would have known that the English had long regarded childbed fever as contagious and would have employed chlorine washing to protect against it.

And:

> Indeed, initial responses to Semmelweis's findings were that he had said nothing new.

But:

> In fact, Semmelweis was warning against all decaying organic matter, not just against a specific contagion that originated from victims of childbed fever themselves. This misunderstanding, and others like it, occurred partly because Semmelweis's work was known only through secondhand reports written by his colleagues and students. At this crucial stage, Semmelweis himself had published nothing.

Why didn't he publish until later? Who knows. The fact is, he didn't and it hurt his case.

And, if you read further, you see that Semmelweis simply went crazy later on, with people later on proposing causes from Alzheimer's to learned helplessness to PTSD. Not a good thing if you are insulting and argumentative to begin with and are proposing a new theory on top of it.

What I find most interesting about the story is the reaction from the medical community.

He was onto something, had data showing the correlation, it was a simple method with no contraindications hindering it's immediate adoption... Still he was faced with incredulity or irrationality. The ones who didn't vilified him, didn't bothered to investigate further either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex

That's great, thanks.

In the cold fusion debate we sometimes forget the theorists who argue `for` and `against` cold fusion in platonic terms - where it has yet to be completely disproved.

Isn't it supposed to be the other way around: proved?

No?

You don't need proof to say "this class of reaction might be possible at a different temperature; we're not sure yet"

The default assumption is that there are many many ways to accomplish any particular chemical or nuclear change.

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