'SETI in no danger of closure' insists director

The director of SETI@home - the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence - has quashed talk of a funding crisis and imminent closure for the grid computing venture.

Earlier this week a leaked email from SETI's chief scientist Dan Werthimer threw light on the problems facing the venture and suggested its very existence may hang in the balance (see http://www.silicon.com/a55957 for more).

However, David Anderson, director of SETI has hit back, saying Werthimer was probably just in a bad mood when he made his pronouncements.

"We all have to devote a lot of our energy to raising money...sometimes it can be a bit discouraging. Dan was probably in a pessimistic mood," said Anderson.

Anderson directly contradicted Werthimer, giving assurances that work on SETI@home II hadn't stopped and that its current funding situation did not pose an immediate threat to the project's continuation.

"I think he was just exaggerating things a bit, I think that if he knew that his email was going to be publicised to the world he would have been more precise about things," said Anderson.

Andrew Colley writes for News.com