Cold fusion: Keeping the research coming

At an MIT lecture hall on Saturday, a convocation of 50 researchers and investors gathered to discuss a phenomenon that allegedly does not exist. Despite a backdrop of meager funding and career-killing derision from mainstream scientists and engineers, cold fusion is anything but a dead field of research. Presenters at the MIT event estimated that 3,000 published studies from scientists around the world have contributed to the growing canon of evidence suggesting that small but promising amounts of energy can be generated using the infamous tabletop apparatus. How reproducible the experiments might be, however, and how the mysterious phenomenon works are still very much open to interpretation. Demonstrating recent results of energetic radiation streaming from a running cold-fusion experiment, Lawrence Forsley of JWK Technologies in Annandale, Virginia, passed around samples of his group's experimental apparatus -- all of which could be packed into a shoebox with room to spare.

The compact plastic and rubber tubing illustrate the intrinsic paradox of this field: Compared to the warehouses worth of billion-dollar gadgetry needed to run "hot fusion," cold fusion research is cheap to fund. And yet cash is the primary limiting factor holding the research back. The scarcity of funding -- and of young blood -- may testify to the discredited nature of the field, but the "greybeards" (as one presenter jokingly referred to his colleagues) keep turning up new results.