Although details have not surfaced, it appears that the University of Utah forced the 23 March 1989 Fleischmann and Pons announcement to establish priority over the discovery and its patents before the joint publication with Jones. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced on 12 April 1989 that it had applied for its own patents based on theoretical work of one of its researchers, Peter L. Hagelstein, who had been sending papers to journals from 5 to 12 April. An MIT graduate student applied for a patent but was reportedly rejected by the USPTO in part by the citation of the "negative" MIT Plasma Fusion Center's cold fusion experiment of 1989. On 2 December 1993 the University of Utah licensed all its cold fusion patents to ENECO, a new company created to profit from cold fusion discoveries, and in March 1998 it said that it would no longer defend its patents.