Gene Mallove: Science Censorship is 'Invisible Evil'

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When in February this year, the Union of Concerned Scientists came out with a warning that "the Bush administration had systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad", a long festering wound was touched, but unfortunately no cleansing process seems to be underway as yet.

Examples for the distortion of science for purposes of either commerce or power politics are all too frequent and the question poses itself, whether we can continue to function as a society if we make our decisions based on voodoo rather than an analysis of unbiased scientific results.

Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, told me that the alteration and deletion of scientific information is now standard procedure at Interior. "It's hard to decide what is more demoralizing about the Administration's politicization of the scientific process," he said, "its disdain for professional scientists working for our government or its willingness to deceive the American public."

This is a quote from "The Junk Science of George W. Bush", an article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., published in The Nation.

The "peer review process", is one of the methods with which scientific orthodoxy has defended itself - rather successfully - against the winds of change. Change and the scientific evidence that would bring it about has been opposed in physics, energy technology, health, the environment, and a number of other sectors. The reasons are various, from financial or political "vested" interests, think about the fossil fuel energy sector, to the scientific "faith" that everything worthwhile has already been discovered and that the basic tenets of physical sciences are no longer open to question.

Gene Mallove, editor of the Infinite Energy magazine, calls science censorship "a crime against civilization, as surely as if hundreds of thousands if not millions had been committed to untimely death..."

Mallove's recent editorial details the "cold fusion vs. hot fusion" controversy, amply documented in Infinite Energy Magazine, which has led to the censorship of perfectly normal scientific research into a new energy source and to the perpetuation of a policy of using petrol-based fuels. In my view, this is certainly a contributing factor to the atrocity of "liberation" that Iraq is currently experiencing at the hands of the US military machine. We must end the invisible evil of science censorship and insist on transparency both in science and in politics, if we are serious about progress.

Video about the suppression of cold fusion - Phenomenon Archives: Heavy Watergate, The War Against Cold Fusion

Read the Infinite Energy editorial in the second part of this article:

16 May 2004:

It is with sadness that I report the recent killing of Eugene Mallove, who was shot yesterday, possibly in relation to a property dispute. More in: New Energy Times.

Here is a page on pureenergysystems.com with links to more information about Gene's tragic death.

Gene Mallove's life work was righting the wrong done when the subject of Cold Fusion and the work of Fleischman and Pons were summarily dismissed by establishment scientists as bogus, after having caused a storm of hope and excitement when the original experiments were announced in the press. Mallove contributed greatly to keeping the flame alive when everyone was saying to forget about Cold Fusion. His Infinite Energy Magazine became a stable point for the Cold Fusion science community and in recent years branched out into other areas of suppressed new energy technologies.

Probably the best way to honor this hero of scientific integrity would be to spread the word about what lay close to his heart: A comprehensive review of the science of cold fusion and in a broader sense, a renaissance in energy technology, an era of real technological progress. Here are some links to a recent Cold Fusion Review:

NEW REPORT ESTABLISHES CASE FOR COLD FUSION

COMPLETE BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SCIENTIFIC STUDIES ON COLD FUSION

Science Censorship: The Invisible Evil
by Eugene F. Mallove, Sc.D.
Infinite Energy, Vol. 9, #54

The Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars have left their landing cocoons and are exploring the surface of an alien world that has long captivated the human imagination. The robotic laboratories are sending back spectacular imagery and other data, which—thanks to the Internet—give scientists and laypeople around the world an unprecedented chance to explore vicariously another planet. There is no doubt that this is a huge accomplishment. It demonstrates progress in technological sophistication in astronautics, communications, computer technology, and robotics applied toward very valuable ends—to learn about another world by touching it from afar.

The success of the latest Martian initiative might suggest to some that all is well in the halls of science. Everything is working “as planned”; new vistas are opening up; we may soon even be confronted with further evidence that Mars harbors some kind of life, or perhaps once had living things that left remains. Science has triumphed. We are collectively experiencing the fruits of over four centuries of revolutionary scientific progress. There appears to be no obvious evidence of science censorship in these missions: Everyone gets to see pretty much all of the data, all at once, in nearly real time. Wonderful!

But beneath this triumph of the extension of human exploration stands another reality about science, one that is not pleasant to contemplate. Just at this moment of success, for those of us who for most of our lives have dreamed of Martian vistas opening up, we are now all too aware of how much more human beings could be accomplishing at this time—and how fantastically better off civilization would be—were we allowed to use collectively all of our faculties and powers of reason.

Isn’t science supposed to be one of the most liberating endeavors? How can I claim that we are not being “allowed” to use all of our faculties and powers toward making a better world? Easy! If there is even one choke point at which appropriate information about scientific discoveries is withheld or diminished, the community of scientists and the supportive citizenry who fund their work publicly and privately are defrauded. Sadly, today such a choke point exists: it is the routine censoring of scientific information that does not conform to the dominant scientific paradigms of the day.

Yes, it is the Internet Age and all kinds of heretical scientific information exists and can flow freely in that ethereal world of rapidly moving digital information. On the Internet one can find large stores of information about cold fusion/LENR (low-energy nuclear reactions), hydrino physics, aether (vacuum) energy, heretical astronomy and cosmology, complementary medicine, scientific evidence for “paranormal” phenomena, and non-Creationist challenges to the Darwinian dogma of natural selection as the prime mover of evolution. On the web there is a cornucopia of scientific heresy, albeit of uncertain quality. And that is the crux of the problem: how is the average citizen, whether scientifically trained or not, to distinguish good from bad scientific information?

Because we are in a transition stage in which the credibility of various sources of information is still being sorted out, we are stuck for now with a system in which certain influential scientific publications are deemed to be reliable authorities on the status of scientific paradigms. For example, Science and Nature magazines have become over the past half century dominant influences on what is to be regarded as “acceptable” and what is not. It is not surprising that the powerful science journalism industry has grown to regard such publications as nearly the final arbiters of truth—though at the same time that science journalism community acknowledges instances of scientific fraud, later discovered, that managed to get published.

So the influence of such publications is far, far greater than their immediate circulation numbers would indicate. If Science and Nature—or Physical Review—have declared certain topics to be off-limits and questionable, you will rarely or never find articles about those topics in The New York Times, Scientific American, Science News, New Scientist, American Scientist, or other organs of more general audience science journalism. But because the general population has assimilated the idea that articles submitted to the archival journals are fairly treated in “peer review,” the “absence of articles” on a particular controversial phenomenon is taken as “evidence of absence of evidence” for the phenomenon itself. Yet there exists incontrovertible proof on a broad range of topics that proves this belief false. These are the very specific instances in which the overt censoring of science was practiced by mainstream scientific publications.

An egregious case of science censorship occurred in recent months with a paper dealing with very clear-cut experimental evidence of nuclear phenomena associated with LENR (a.k.a. “cold fusion”) experimental cells. I am not at liberty to reveal the identities of the scientists, since they are in the process of submitting the exemplary article to another archival publication. The paper, submitted to Science by credentialed scientists, one of whom is a full professor at a university in the United States, was rejected without review; the article was not even submitted to the review cycle by the receiving editors! Why not? Clearly it was because the paper dealt with one of the forbidden topics for which there is a de facto or actual complete ban on reviewed primary articles.