Two Scientists Proving as Elusive as Cold Fusion : Research: Electrochemists fail to attend a meeting on funding to continue their controversial energy studies.

With the future of Utah’s cold fusion research program hanging in the balance, the saga of two scientists who claimed last year to have discovered fusion-in-a-jar slipped further into the realm of comic opera Thursday when neither showed up for a critical meeting to reassess state funding for the program.

The University of Utah’s Stanley Pons has mysteriously disappeared, and has been communicating with his institution only by one-way fax. In the latest missive, Pons asked the university this week for a one-year sabbatical, and his lawyer claims the time is needed for the scientist to pursue a “new phase” in his research.

But in another twist in the bizarre story of cold fusion, state officials said the elusive Pons agreed by telephone Thursday to return to the campus next month.

Pons had been slated to give a major presentation Thursday to the state Fusion Energy Advisory Council, which has been watching over the expenditure of $5 million in state funds. The program was established after Pons and fellow electrochemist Martin Fleischmann stunned the world of science last year when they announced that they had achieved nuclear fusion with a simple tabletop device.

A flurry of follow-up attempts around the world failed to substantiate their claims, casting the professional reputations of the duo into limbo. The enterprise deteriorated into a sometimes vicious debate with charges of scientific fraud and ineptitude coming from experts who normally are most proper and restrained in judging the work of others.

Frustrated state officials went into the meeting hoping to hear from Pons, but Pons did not show up. He is believed to be somewhere in Europe.

“We asked why we could not see the data (supporting Pons’ work) and they (university officials) said because Pons was gone and wasn’t available to share it,” said state science adviser Randy Moon. “We asked when we could hear from him, and nobody knew for sure.”

Moon said the council demanded that Pons comply with the council’s request during a full review next month. And in yet another surprise development, Moon said, the attorney general announced Thursday that Pons had agreed to return to Utah Nov. 7 and take part in a review of his work. Moon said the attorney general, Joe Tesch, reached Pons through his attorney and did not disclose the whereabouts of the scientist.

Fleischmann also missed the hearing because he has returned from Utah to his home in England and said he did not learn of the meeting until it was too late to attend--a claim that was denied by university officials.

State support for the research has been highly controversial, and state officials had hoped Pons could lay their fears to rest Thursday.

But the Pons residence is up for sale, and he was nowhere to be found. The only firm clue as to his whereabouts came from his son’s schoolteacher, who told the Associated Press she had been informed that the family had moved to France “for a year or so.” His home phone has been disconnected.

Fleischmann, who is with the University of Southampton in England, was in London where he was undergoing medical treatment for an undisclosed illness. That left people in Utah at a loss to defend the celebrated work of the two scientists, and even some of their friends were angry.

Fritz Will, director of the institute, who has strongly defended Pons and Fleischmann in the past, said he had pressed the two to attend the meeting and defend their work, and “they have categorically refused.”

As to Fleischmann’s claim that he did not know about the meeting, Will said:

“I think that is a very tasteless, dangerous accusation coming from a party that has not given us the kind of cooperation that I, the president of the university and the state committee would have expected,” he said.

Pons and Fleischmann shocked the world of science last year when they held a press conference on the Salt Lake City campus and announced that they had achieved a milestone that has eluded top scientists for decades. The two claimed they had produced excess energy with fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun. And they had done it with their own money, using a simple device that any college physics student should be able to duplicate.

The announcement was greeted with skepticism by physicists who argued that it required temperatures of many millions of degrees to cause fusion. But even as they shouted nay, experts around the world raced to their laboratories to try to duplicate the work of the two chemists. The claim gained some credibility from the fact that both Pons and Fleischmann were well respected in their field, and it seemed unthinkable that a university that endorsed their claim would go so far out on a limb without proof of the validity of the experiment.

But after months of painstaking research, no one has been able to duplicate the work of Pons and Fleischmann, although some scientists have claimed success on some fronts but not others.

The claim became headline news around the world because it offered the hope of ending the world’s energy woes. Cold fusion could have been powered by fuel from the sea, and, miraculously, the simple device produced none of the harmful radioactive byproducts associated with nuclear energy.

Physicists said they did not see how that could be possible, since those dangerous byproducts are a crucial part of the signature of a fusion reaction.

It became a source of profound frustration for some distinguished researchers in the world of physics, including members of a Caltech team who announced, initially with some embarrassment, that they had been unable to duplicate the experiment. Other similar results followed, and within months after “cold fusion” sprang forth on an unsuspecting world, it had been thoroughly trounced by reputable scientists who were convinced it could not be true.

Despite that formidable opposition, the University of Utah has stood firmly behind the two scientists. With state funding, the university created the National Cold Fusion Institute to pave the way for the state to cash in on the rewards that seemed to be waiting in the wings. Most of the $5 million has been spent, and further state support is essential if the program is to continue.

Pons and Fleischmann will get another chance to present their case when the review gets under way next month. Moon, the state’s science adviser, said a panel of at least four “outside scientists” will begin a review of the work being done at the university’s fusion institute. He said none of the scientists on the panel will be from Utah.

And, at least as of Thursday, Pons is expected to cooperate with the review.

Moon said Pons’ latest pledge has left him a little more optimistic than he had been earlier in the day on whether the state has made a blunder in funding the research. If the panel, whose membership has not been announced, finds cause to continue the work, it will continue, Moon said.

“But I’m not going to hold my breath,” he said.