One of the weirdest chapters in modern science has closed with the
announcement that the University of Utah in Salt Lake City is allowing its
patents on cold fusion to lapse. 鈥淲e will not defend them,鈥� says Richard Koehn,
Utah鈥檚 vice-president for research.
In 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, then working at the University
of Utah, stunned the world by announcing that they had achieved nuclear fusion
at room temperature. The claim was never verified. Koehn says that the
university was morally obliged to defend its former employees鈥� intellectual
property, but after spending more than $1 million, it has decided that
enough is enough.