Cold fusion and reproducibility

In response to Bernard J. Feldman’s review (Physics Today, July 2010, page 50) of David Goodstein’s book, On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science, I offer a note on reproducibility and cold fusion. High-temperature superconductors were initially very difficult to reproduce, and many obscure results were noted but not regularly reproduced. If the researchers had sat on the results until they were totally reproducible, the field would have taken years longer to develop. The cold-fusion results suffered from actually being reproducible—so long as the experiment was flawed in the same way as the original. I think Feldman has way overstated the importance of reproducibility to first publishing. Besides, as much as it felt like we had been foolishly led astray in the end, wasn’t it fun to examine the possibility of cold fusion and those very odd and interesting electrochemical effects?