Dr. Michael McKubre: A Lifelong LENR Experimentalist

Dr. Michael McKubre is a distinguished figure in the LENR community. His scientific voyage began in a New Zealand classroom, where a high school chemistry teacher ignited his passion for science. “I didn’t like school,” he recalls, but a single teacher turned him toward chemistry. “He had a knack for making things go bang–which interests fifteen-year-olds,” he told me, “Chemistry was the first thing that interested me, and I never thought of doing anything else.”

His love for the subject grew as he continued his education. "Chemistry combines the hands-on with the theoretical," McKubre explained. He noted that his fascination with science was not just about observing reactions but understanding the principles that govern them, a curiosity that set the foundation for his future endeavors. McKubre went on to pursue degrees in chemistry, physics, and geophysics. He benefited greatly from what he called the “beautiful system” of education in New Zealand, where he pursued a free public education. Because of his father’s work abroad, McKubre studied in both New Zealand and the United States.

During his doctoral studies, his PhD supervisor was a former student of John Bockris, “the king of electrochemistry and number one electrochemist in the world,” as McKubre described him. Bockris would go on to make his contributions to LENR. McKubre and Bockris interacted a lot during those years, and Bockris profoundly influenced McKubre’s thinking.

After graduating, McKubre did postdoctoral work with Graham Hills at the University of Southampton, where Dr. Martin Fleischmann worked. “If you want to work with anybody, you want to work with Fleischmann,” McKubre told me, adding, “It turns out you don't want to work with Fleischman…he’s a tough man to work with, but it's nice to be around him, and he was one of the few people I call a genius, so that predisposed me to be to be positive when Fleischmann and Pons made their announcement on March 23, 1989.”

Through many synchronicities and fortuitous encounters, McKubre’s educational background prepared him for a career in the LENR world: his mentors and colleagues were leaders in the field, and McKubre himself gained expertise in the deuterium-palladium systems that are at the heart of many LENR experiments. “I was just very lucky,” he said of his path to what became his life’s work.

Because of these experiences, McKubre was primed to enter the world of cold fusion when Fleischmann-along with Pons–made their controversial announcement in 1989. “I was already working in the Palladium hydrogen system by pure coincidence for different reasons,” he explained, and knowing of Fleischmann’s stellar reputation, he said, “I was inclined to think that there might be a chance here.”

While many people wrote it off, McKubre remembers thinking, “Okay, I think we've got a 50/50 shot here,” so he convinced managers at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to convert some of the funding that McKubre had received so he could pursue some experiments “to see if my old friends Fleischmann and Pons were crazy or not.”

“So we set ourselves a hard project,” he told me. They designed rigorous, complex experiments “so that we weren't tempted to rush to the news media and report, you know, initial positive or initial negative results as many of my colleagues did.” They avoided the media frenzy and kept their head down, spending a few months thinking carefully and performing experiments. They got a positive result. “That single positive result has conditioned the rest of my life,” he said.

So McKubre continued. "It was the most interesting thing I could think of doing and the most closely adapted to my experience set." His firsthand knowledge of palladium-hydrogen systems, vital to the cold fusion process, uniquely positioned him to undertake his experiments in this field. Central to McKubre’s scientific career is his rigorous approach to experimentation. He’s not one for sensationalizing his results or jumping ahead of them.

“Seven days a week, twelve hours a day…over the weekends, over the vacations, we just were so interested, we spent a huge amount of time in the laboratory running experiments and and keeping our mouths shut, and one of the things that has allowed me to survive in this field as long as I have is that I didn't make ridiculous announcements early. Once you start saying ridiculous things in public, you feel obliged to defend them.”

This attitude has allowed McKubre to pursue cutting-edge work while staying close to the empirical data from his experimental studies. Across his many years of research, he has designed and conducted experiments that methodically explored the anomalous production of heat in electrochemical cells. “I'm very much an experimentalist…I do experiments without prejudice without hoping for an outcome–as best as I can. And we're all biased, but I do the experiments, try and learn from the results, and then go back and do another experiment.”

This dedication to empirical evidence is a hallmark of his scientific philosophy, favoring precision and skepticism over haste and assumption. But he couples that rigor with a boundless curiosity and maverick attitude. Dr. McKubre's philosophy is rooted in open-mindedness and the pursuit of truth, even when it leads to conclusions that diverge from mainstream scientific thought. He champions the importance of challenging established norms and encourages a collaborative scientific environment to tackle complex problems in LENR. “Everybody can't be a rebel, but I've always been something of a rebel. You know, I was a bit of a hippie as a youth so I always look at the alternative.”

At times, this attitude has him playing devil’s advocate and questioning things people take for granted. “My first thought,” he explained, “is ‘what’s wrong with that statement? Why is that not true?’” This meant sometimes being at odds with those he respected greatly, especially regarding skepticism around LENR promoted largely by physicists. In this vein, he was inspired by physics greats like Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger, “the prince of solid-state nuclear physics.” Recalling a lecture Schwinger gave at the first ICCF conference, McKubre told me, “The phrase that stuck in my mind forever is ‘the circumstances of cold fusion are not those of hot fusion.’” Indeed, throughout his career, McKubre has been driven by his ardent curiosity about these mysterious conditions, from lattice changes to unknown interactions to “charge points in free space with nothing around them,” adding that studying this parameter space is important as “something around them makes a difference.”

He was figuring out that “something” is one of the greatest challenges in the field. He explained how even doing the same experiment identically in the same laboratory often produced different results, as controlling all the variables is very difficult. For example, he did an experiment replicating identical experiments three dozen times, and all produced different outcomes. In our conversation, I asked him if he agreed with the "recipe" analogy that came up a lot in my conversations with LENR scientists. He answered, "That's a beautiful analogy, and I think, what's to bread: yeast, salt, water, flour? That's it, but some people make terrible bread, and others make exquisite bread. It's just the technique, timing, proportions, and four variables, and we're not dealing with a problem with four variables." In addition to countless variables, he explained, systematic error is also guaranteed to reproduce. Yet despite these challenges, McKubre remains committed to his inquiries.

Through decades of dedicated research and a deep commitment to scientific integrity, Dr. Michael McKubre has not only shaped the understanding of LENR but has also inspired a generation of scientists to explore beyond the conventional horizons of energy science. His story is a compelling testament to the impact one individual can have in challenging and expanding the frontiers of scientific knowledge.

Reflecting on the importance of cold fusion, he told me, “It was the most important thing that had happened in science for fifty years, and it spoke directly to humanity's most important problem, which is where do we get our energy from in the future when the existing energy sources run out? Energy is the basis for everything that civilization requires. [If] we run out of energy, we run out of civilization. So I knew it was a really, really important thing.”

However, McKubre shared that this clean energy application of cold fusion wasn’t his central motivation. “It’s also a fascinating piece of science, you know, and this is a hard problem!” he explained, with the curiosity that began in a classroom decades ago still animating his inquiries now.