In 1991, Eugene Mallove who was the chief science writer with the MIT News office, said that he believes the negative report issued by MIT's Plasma Fusion Center in 1989, which was highly influential in the controversy, was fraudulent because "data was shifted"[56] without explanation, and as a consequence, this action obscured a possible positive excess heat result at MIT. In protest of MIT's failure to discuss and acknowledge the significance of this data shift, he resigned from his post of chief science writer at the MIT News office on June 7, 1991. He maintained that the data shift was biased to both support the conventional belief in the nonexistence of the cold fusion effect as well as to protect the financial interests of the plasma fusion center's research in hot fusion.[57]
Also in 1991, Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger said that he had experienced "the pressure for conformity in editor's rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous reviewers. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science".[58] He resigned as Member and Fellow of the American Physical Society, in protest of its peer review practice on cold fusion.
In 1992, the Wilson group from General Electric challenged the Fleischmann-Pons 1990 paper in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry.[59] The Wilson group asserted that the claims of excess heat had been overstated, but they were unable to "prove that no excess heat" was generated. Wilson concluded that the Fleischmann and Pons cell generated approximately 40% excess heat and amounted to 736 mW, more than ten times larger than the error levels associated with the data.
Despite the apparent confirmation by Wilson, Fleischmann and Pons responded to the Wilson critique and published a rebuttal, also in the same issue of Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. [60] To this day, Fleischmann and Pons' seminal paper has never been refuted in the scientific literature. [61]
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