A short story of Dr Seaborg is reported by people having transcripted his courses "my service with 10 presidents"... http://www.lbl.gov/LBL-PID/Nobelists/Seaborg/presidents/23.html
I was called to Washington on April 14, 1989, to brief George Bush on cold fusion. I don't know whether you know what cold fusion is, but it was the idea that you could fuse nuclei very easily and get a lot of energy just by passing electric current through heavy water, whereas, of course, physicists had built huge machines and worked for decades trying to do this, spending billions of dollars. The chemists thought they'd really stolen a march on them. The idea swept the country and I was called to Washington to brief President Bush on it. It was a real dilemma. What should I do? I decided to take my background as a nuclear scientist and really come to the sensible conclusion that this work was not right, that it was really cold. You couldn't do it. So that's what I told him at that time. I said, "You can't just go out and say this is not valid. You're going to have to create a high-level panel that will study it for six months, and then they'll come out and tell you it's not valid," and that's what he did.
