LETTERS TO L.A. LIFE : CLAIM LEAVES SCIENTIST COLD.

I read with interest your recent article regarding professor Nathan Lewis and his quest for an artificial nose (L.A. Life, March 1).

Regarding the first paragraph about professor Lewis' background, I strongly object to your statement that ``A decade ago, he led a team that handily debunked the myth of cold fusion.''

The actual facts are that cold fusion research continues, and that I and others handily debunked his research results on this topic (see for example the Journal of Physical Chemistry, Vol. 98, pp. 1948-1952, 1994). Professor Lewis has never replied to the various errors that I and others exposed about his research and to the fact that his results actually support the cold fusion claims of excess heat. The Seventh International Conference on cold fusion was held April 19-24, 1998, in Vancouver, Canada, the Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference held Aug. 2-6, 1998, in Colorado Springs contained a cold fusion session, and the prestigious American Physical Society meeting in Atlanta will have a session relating to cold fusion on March 26. The Web location for the abstracts of the session in Atlanta is the following: http://www.aps.org/meet/CENT99/BAPS/abs/S9500.html

Cold fusion is obviously not a debunked science as claimed in your article, but progress is slow since we do not yet understand this new phenomena. As a taxpayer, I hope professor Lewis' government-funded work on an artificial nose is a vast improvement over his flawed escapade into cold fusion.

- Melvin H. Miles, Ph.D.

Chemistry and Materials Branch

Research and Technology Division

Code 4T4220DBR Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division 

China Lake, Ridgecrest

Objecting to drug as `cure'

Re: ``Getting closer to a cure'' regarding the common cold (March 8, L.A. Life):

Why is it that all ``cures'' have to be connected to a drug? I have found the opposite to be true! Drugs, which turn out to be so ``miraculous'' usually create more problems than they solve.

In the 38 years that I have spent researching health, I have noted that the universal law of cause and effect works better than anything else ... and it has no side effects.

I started noting years ago, as soon as I ate something that did not belong in my body, my nose started running. Now I avoid these foods. It didn't take any kind of drugs to solve the problem.

- Barbara Charis

North Hollywood

Backlash against Kazan comes from narrow minds

The fight by Hollywood liberals against honoring anti-communist director Elia Kazan will be remembered with the same red-faced embarrassment as Hollywood's attack against Dan Quayle for his family values speech, which had liberal publications and politicians only belatedly seizing the same issue as their own (L.A. Life letters, March 7).

As usual, Hollywood has fallen way behind the times, with its political and social values reeking with the dated '60s iconoclasm of lock-step conformity on social and political issues, only to eventually play catch-up to everyone else. The level of vitriol by the Hollywood left against anyone whose opinion dares to differ from their group's would punish an anti-communist director for his beliefs and for his refusal to value conformity to a group over individual integrity.

- Caroline Miranda

North Hollywood