James John Brophy; Supporter of Utah Cold Fusion Study

James John Brophy, 65, the University of Utah vice president who helped persuade his state Legislature to appropriate $5 million for the school’s controversial venture into cold fusion research. Brophy led the school’s response during the tumultuous months after the March, 1989, announcement that researchers had achieved nuclear fusion in a tabletop, room-temperature experiment. The announcement by electrochemists B. Stanley Pons and his British colleague, Martin Fleischmann, sent scientists from around the world scrambling unsuccessfully to duplicate the experiments. Brophy had helped persuade the Utah Legislature to appropriate the start-up funds for the National Cold Fusion Institute on the university campus. The institute failed to obtain sufficient outside funding and closed earlier this year. Even after the influential British Atomic Energy Authority abandoned efforts to replicate the Utah experiment, Brophy continued to endorse the Pons-Fleischmann research. He had joined the university as research vice president in 1980 from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He retired in June and was named a professor emeritus of physics and electrical engineering. Brophy wrote more than 100 technical papers on solid-state physics and held a number of patents. He authored such books as “Basic Electronics for Scientists” and “Semiconductor Devices.” In Salt Lake City on Saturday of pancreatic cancer.