ABSTRACT
In 1989, more than 60 laboratories around the world officially announced that they had replicated Pons and Fleischmann’s experiment and achieved ‘cold’ nuclear fusion. At least two Nobel prizes for physiology have been awarded for discoveries that subsequently proved non-existent: the one awarded in 1903 for the discovery of phototherapy, and the 1927 prize for the treatment of dementia paralytica. For years, the National Institutes of Health gave large amounts of ‘ad personam’ funding to the virologist Peter Duesberg, today regarded as ‘a public menace’ by broad sectors of medical research because of his heterodox views on the aetiology of AIDS.
