Eugene Mallove – Visionary Scientist

Eugene Franklin Mallove (June 9, 1947 – May 14, 2004) was an American scientist, science writer, editor, and publisher of Infinite Energy magazine, and founder of the nonprofit organization New Energy Foundation. Robert X Bishop and Eugene Mallove worked with Sir Arthur C. Clarke on Arthur’s idea of infinite energy. Eugene focused his scientific work on LENR or “Low Energy Nuclear Reactions” while Robert focused on the use of sound to greatly reduce the amount of energy required to dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen, hydrogen set to be the primary fuel for the human race. This produced not only the perfect fuel but also included the oxidizer making the technology perfect not only to power terrestrial civilization, but also to power spacecrafts. Robert conducted investigations into most of the technologies which claimed to be the solution to humanities energy need and was friends with many of the leading players. Eugene was by far the most interesting.  Eugene was a true proponent of cold fusion or LENR, and a supporter of its research and related exploratory alternative energy topics, several of which are sometimes characterized as “fringe science”.
Mallove authored Fire from Ice, a book detailing the 1989 report of tabletop cold fusion from Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann at the University of Utah. Among other things, the book claims the team did produce “greater-than-unity” output energy in an experiment successfully replicated on several occasions, but that the results were suppressed through an organized campaign of ridicule from mainstream physicists, including those studying controlled thermonuclear fusion, trying to protect their research and funding.
Mallove died where he had spent many youthful nights staring up at the stars. The only child of a plumber and math teacher, he had grown up on Salem Turnpike, devouring Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi novels and launching Estes rockets into the sky. Space exploration wasn’t just an idle curiosity, but the means through which Mallove understood his place in the universe. For Eugene, working with Sir Arthur C. Clarke was the dream of a life time.
When it was time to head to college in the 1960s, Mallove went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which boasted the nation’s first aeronautics program. The academic setting suited him. He became president of the school’s Rocket Team and ran high-powered fuel tests in the basement of the engineering building. (Escaping exhaust inadvertently killed the azalea plants outside.) The closer he could get to science, the better. During a trip with friends to Cape Canaveral, Mallove convinced the guards that he was a friend of famed rocket scientist Wernher von Braun—the architect of Nazi Germany’s V-2 rocket and America’s Saturn V—in order to take photographs indoors. “Gene was a dreamer,” recalls Dean Musgrave, a fellow student and friend. Mallove later recounted, quite fondly, his days pursuing degrees in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. “There were no future astronauts in our class,” he wrote in an essay included in a commemorative book for his 25-year class reunion, “but many of us worked on the ground to help our expansion into space.” After snagging a doctorate in environmental health sciences at Harvard, Mallove worked at firms exploring alternative spacecraft propulsion methods, in order to blast humans to the stars. Yet lab life proved too isolating. Mallove realized that his calling wasn’t to engineer science, but to translate the latest trends, technologies, and discoveries for a mass audience. After contributing to publications such as the Washington Post and MIT Technology Review, Mallove landed his first full-time journalism job at Voice of America. “I came to my career in science writing at no small sacrifice in compensation, simply because I enjoy writing more,” he later recalled, “and I believed that it would give me greater reach.” In 1987, his professional life came full circle when he signed on as chief science writer for the MIT News Office, just a 70-mile commute from his New Hampshire home. Mallove “believed in the technology coming down the pike,” Musgrave recalls. “We didn’t grasp that the world was a messy place until he got involved in cold fusion.”