As a devoted champion of cold fusion, Eugene Mallove had good reason to be optimistic this year. In late March, the Department of Energy agreed to review the 15-year history of the cold fusion question, lending credibility to a low-energy nuclear reaction concept that Mallove felt had been unfairly dismissed.

Those feelings had caused Mallove -a Pembroke resident who was killed Friday in Connecticut - to quit his job as the head science writer for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Upset by what he perceived to be MIT's institutional slighting of cold fusion, he founded a private nonprofit aimed at advancing discoveries related to cold fusion and other new energy sources.

"In 1989, he was smart enough and knew enough about what was going on to recognize that the dismissal of cold fusion was done hastily and prematurely," said Mallove's friend Peter Hagelstein, an electrical engineering and computer science professor at MIT, and a member of the small academic community that has continued to research the idea of cold fusion. "He recognized that . . . when we use up the oil supply, we will still need energy and we will have to have other sources."

After the announced discovery of cold fusion in 1989, scientists everywhere began trying to replicate cold fusion in their own laboratories, without immediate success. Because the concept challenged existing understandings of science, the failures only muddied the issue.

Of those "unusual times,"Hagelstein recalled: "It dominated the interest on behalf of the public in the area of science. There's a headache associated with that. . . . The problem with such a wild and dramatic claim is that many, if not most, scientists didn't believe it. For this to be dominating the science news was a bad thing -because no other science was getting any airtime. And if this proved not to be correct, as most scientists were sure to be the case, then the damage would be incalculable.

"Namely, if this proved to be a major embarrassment and dragged on for a long time, then the enthusiasm for scientific enterprise among the public would be damaged and the impact would be dramatic for all scientists."

Less than two months after the initial announcement, the American Physical Society convened and "cold fusion was ceremoniously dumped off the radar screen. It's been in disrespect ever since,"Hagelstein said. In the fall of 1989, the Department of Energy received a formal report from an advisory panel recommending that no special funding be devoted to cold fusion, a move that has historically been perceived as a death knell.

An MIT experiment that found serious flaws in the cold fusion claims received significant attention in those first weeks in 1989. As a devoted alumnus and university spokesman, Mallove was devastated by what he perceived to be data imperfections in that experiment and a general campus culture of stifling cold fusion. "In Gene's view, it was a major travesty," Hagelstein said. " . . . As a result, he voted with his feet, and afterwards he tried the best that he knew how to do to raise consciousness on this topic."

That included launching a bimonthly magazine, Infinite Energy, and writing Fire From Ice: Searching For the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor, a book that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Despite the recognition, Mallove's was an uphill battle against scientists like Robert Park, a representative of the APS and a frequent newspaper guest columnist. Park's book Voodoo Science was critical of cold fusion.

To Mallove, these dismissals were shortsighted, given the geopolitical implications of finding new, non-depleting energy. In Infinite Energy, he wrote that Park and others in "late twentieth-century establishment physics" had failed in thinking that fundamental theory is "sacrosanct." By doing so, they had "abandoned what little curiosity about scientific experiments that they may have had at the beginning of their scientific careers."

He became a visionary leader to the world of new-energy devotees, a community unified in its frustration with the mainstream position. Steve Kaplan, a New Energy Movement board member, said he once heard a Nobel Prize-winning scientist tell a conference that there's no evidence for cold fusion and never will be. "That's hardly a scientific attitude," said Kaplan, who called Mallove a "tireless fighter."

"Try to imagine that you were Galileo at the time when he was trying to get people to see the truth that he was trying to put forth,"Kaplan said. "You had church establishment, mainly, that would not look at any other way of looking at the heavens. And now you have a scientific establishment that is acting in much the same way - they know the truth, the truth is XYZ, and they don't look at any evidence to the contrary."

Mallove suffered a credibility loss over time, said Hagelstein, one of less than 100 scientists who continue to focus a significant portion of their research on cold fusion. As he expanded his magazine to encompass many types of new energy, the MIT- and Harvard-educated Mallove attracted followers outside of academia, which created more skepticism among scientists, Hagelstein said. Among Mallove's fans, conspiracy theorists on the Web have already started speculating that his death came at the hands of fossil-fuel industry muscle, to silence the top advocate for a cheap and abundant new energy.

Hagelstein, who won the federal EO Lawrence Prize in 1984 for his work on X-ray lasers, was skeptical of cold fusion at first. But he persisted among the minority continuing to research it, feeling that a 40-day consideration by the establishment in 1989 was insufficient. Hagelstein ultimately came to see "that in fact there were new effects that were going on in the lab, and they were deserving of attention and some effort to try to understand them."

The 10th annual International Conference on Cold Fusion, held last summer in Cambridge and touted by Mallove in Infinite Energy, provided the catalyst in getting the federal government to reconsider cold fusion. A Wall Street Journal reporter in attendance wrote "that perhaps most problematic about the conference was not what was presented and discussed at the conference, but the lack of interest on the part of the scientific community." But the demonstrations at the conference proved to be a tipping point in winning over some members of the "hardnosed"set, said Hagelstein, who wrote to U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and urged the reconsideration. Without fanfare or press release, the government agreed.

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