Following the accident (of which U. Akron never supplied me any photos of despite EOHS taking numerous pictures) “Kennedy” had me back to working on polymerizations and requested the construction of a less dangerous cooling bath.  Despite having spent almost one month on the construction of this bath, “Kennedy” decided to not use it.  During this period my relations with both Stas and “Kennedy” continued to deteriorate as I was never able to reproduce any of Stas’ results in the area of the Yb(OTf)₃ polymerization system (please see files below this paragraph).  Likewise, Stas began acting unusual and his physical appearance, odor, and physiological responses began to take a weird turn.  For example, on numerous occasions he acted paranoid during experimentation.  According to him, failure was certain unless I did as he said.  He also appeared to be either drunk or sedated by some sort of drug and his body odor at times had become so unpleasant that people could not stand to be in the same office cube room as him.  While working in complete air conditioning he would begin to sweat profusely as if he was running a marathon.  As I continued to question his previous results threats were being lodged against me, death threats.  These threats were of such a grave nature that I had to begin locking all personal belongings in a filing cabinet to prevent the possibility of being poisoned.  A friend of mine, Mr. S. Carrolla and I approached “Kennedy” about Stas but as per usual “Kennedy” did nothing.

(This is a picture of a master table of experiments Dr. Lewis conducted in an attempt to replicate work originally reported by Stas and Dr. “Kennedy”)

Yb master table summary 4-24-01 (this file contains tabulated data necessary to construct the table shown in the above picture).

I soon began to suspect that “Kennedy” was possibly the mastermind behind the entire fabrication of experimental data.  During several group meetings between the three of us “Kennedy” would make unusual comments.  For example, after Stas started to become somewhat belligerent during one meeting “Kennedy” stated, “You know Stas, Stalin wasn’t a bad guy.  He did many good things.” To which Stas replied, “Dr. ‘Kennedy’ you should not say these things.”  While attending these meetings I kept voicing my concern over the fact that Stas did not possess any physical samples of the polymers he had supposedly made.  “Kennedy’s” reply to me was, “I don’t care about samples.  Go into the lab and make me data.”  It seemed as if my assumptions were true.  To me it would appear that the entire thing was fake from the very beginning and both Stas and “Kennedy” knew it.  Still, I wasn’t sure as “Kennedy” didn’t give me a direct order to falsify data, but what else could “Go into the lab and make me data.” mean if physical samples were not important?  Regardless, my conscious is such that even at that time doing such a thing was impossible for me.  So, I returned to the lab once more (at least for approximately one more week) to conduct some final experimentation.