Historical research guide · 0423 · 2012
Biological Transmutations: Historical Perspective
Jean-Paul Biberian
In one minute
Jean-Paul Biberian, a surface physicist at Aix-Marseille University and a long-standing editor in the condensed-matter nuclear field, gathers two centuries of experiments in which living things finish with more of an element than went into them. The names are real and the record is long: Vauquelin isolating a hen in 1799 and measuring about five times more calcium coming out than the oats brought in, alongside a drop in silicon; Baranger at the École Polytechnique running thousands of vetch-seed analyses from 1950 to 1970; Zündel weighing calcium in oat sprouts; and most recently Vysotskii and Kornilova growing bacteria in heavy water and reporting, by Mössbauer spectroscopy and time-of-flight mass spectrometry, an iron-57 signal where manganese and deuterium had been. Biberian also sets out thirteen experiments that found nothing, including a French Atomic Energy Commission analysis that saw no isotopic shift at all. His conclusion is that the effect is real, the theory missing, and the work cheap enough that the question deserves settling.
Connection
Chapter 12 is about nuclear reactions that happen inside ordinary matter rather than in a plasma, and this is the field’s own record of that claim’s oldest and least examined branch. Biberian is unusually explicit about what would close it — isotope-resolved measurements repeated independently — and about the energy accounting and Coulomb-barrier problem any working theory has to satisfy.
From the source
Biberian’s central proposition is that living organisms can, under some conditions, carry out nuclear reactions, so the mass-conservation law Antoine Lavoisier established for chemistry in 1789 does not describe them; he names the missing theory and the irreproducibility of some experiments as the two problems the field has to solve, and suggests that significant transmutation may require another element to be absent from the medium.Section 8.4, Conclusion
Louis Vauquelin isolated a hen in 1799, fed it a pound of oats, and analysed the eggs and droppings: about five times more calcium came out than went in, together with a decrease in silicon, and he noted that a loss of 1.274 grams of silica cannot account for a gain of 14.118 grams of limestone. He asked other scientists to repeat the experiment.Section 4.3, Louis Nicolas Vauquelin
Pierre Baranger, professor of organic chemistry at the École Polytechnique, ran the largest statistical test of the effect from 1950 to 1970 — thousands of analyses of vetch seeds germinated in twice-distilled water, samples of seven to ten grams weighed to a hundredth of a milligram — and found calcium up 4.2 percent and iron up 8.3 percent against phosphorus down 1.9 percent and potassium down 1.1 percent, with adding manganese chloride raising the iron. Biberian records that no specialist who examined the work found an experimental error and that it was never accepted for publication.Section 5.9, Pierre Baranger
Vladimir Vysotskii and Alla Kornilova grew bacteria and yeast able to live in heavy water, added manganese sulphate, and report by Mössbauer spectroscopy and time-of-flight mass spectrometry a mass-57 peak as large as the mass-56 peak, which they read as manganese-55 plus deuterium giving iron-57; they report the same isotope-resolved signature for sodium-23 plus phosphorus-31 giving iron-54, for caesium-133 plus hydrogen giving barium-134, and for radioactive caesium-137 converting to the much shorter-lived barium-138. Biberian calls this the best evidence in the review.Section 6.3, Vladimir Vysotskii
The review devotes a full section to thirteen experiments that found no effect, including the French Atomic Energy Commission’s 1975 neutron-activation analysis of Zündel’s oat seeds, which found no change in calcium, sodium or manganese and no isotopic variation in calcium-48 or potassium-41; Jungerman and Murphy at the University of California, Davis in 1977; Franke at Heidelberg in 1978; and Di Vito and colleagues in Italy in 2002.Section 5.12; Section 7, Negative Experiments, items 7.10, 7.12 and 7.13
Biberian states the constraints any theory has to satisfy: many of the proposed biological reactions gain mass rather than lose it, so they would have to concentrate energy from the environment instead of releasing it, and the reacting nuclei must find each other inside the same biological structure and get through the Coulomb barrier. The two mechanisms on the table are Costa de Beauregard’s weak-interaction route by neutrino capture and Goldfein’s 1978 US Army Mobility Equipment Research and Development Command report proposing stacked magnesium-ATP acting as a molecular cyclotron.Section 8.2, Costa de Beauregard; Section 8.3, Goldfein; closing paragraph of Section 8.4
The way in
https://doi.org/10.70923/001c.72176How to cite it
Jean-Paul Biberian (2012) Biological Transmutations: Historical Perspective doi:10.70923/001c.72176