Historical research guide · 0653 · 1999

Mossbauer investigation of the phenomenon of isotope (Mn55 to Fe57) nuclear transmutation in growing biological cultures

Vladimir I. Vysotskii · Alia A. Kornilova · Igor I. Samoylenko

In one minute

Vladimir Vysotskii of Kiev National Shevchenko University, Alla Kornilova of Moscow State University and Igor Samoylenko report an experiment with an unusually sharp readout. They grow ordinary microbial cultures — bacteria and brewer’s yeast — in a sugar-and-salt broth made with heavy water rather than ordinary water, starved of iron, and dosed with manganese. If the growing cells can join a manganese-55 nucleus to a deuterium nucleus, the product is iron-57: a rare isotope, only about two per cent of natural iron, and the one isotope that Mössbauer spectroscopy can see with almost no ambiguity. The team dries the harvested cultures, grinds them to a powder and puts them in a Mössbauer spectrometer. The iron-57 resonance appears in the flask that had both heavy water and manganese, and the signal is small but real. To rule out iron carried in by the water, the salts, the glassware or the air, they run the same culture in four flasks at once, so any contamination would show up in the controls as well.

Connection

Chapter 12 is about the Coulomb barrier being an adjustable thing rather than a fixed wall — change what surrounds the nuclei and the tunnelling rate changes. Vysotskii and Kornilova push that idea into the strangest environment available, the interior of a living, growing cell, and they do it with the one measurement that leaves the least room for argument, the iron-57 Mössbauer line. Read it beside the historical survey at /library/stm-38077a857a and the authors’ later programme at /library/stm-444129e3db.

From the source

The experiment tests the reaction manganese-55 plus a deuteron giving iron-57 inside growing microbiological cultures — at growing membranes and during DNA replication — in a heavy-water sugar-and-salt nutrient medium that is deficient in iron and dosed with manganese sulphate.Abstract; statement of the expected reaction and of the medium
Iron-57 is the right product to look for because it is both rare and easy to see: it makes up about 2.2 per cent of natural iron, against 91.7 per cent for iron-56, and it is the nucleus the Mössbauer effect reads, so a small amount of newly made iron-57 gives a resonance that ordinary iron does not imitate.Abstract; the choice of the Mössbauer readout
The iron-57 Mössbauer resonance is observed in the dried, powdered cultures grown in heavy water with manganese; in the single-strain cultures the resonance amplitude is small, about 0.2 per cent of the baseline, corresponding to a production rate of order one hundred-millionth of an iron-57 nucleus per second per manganese nucleus.Mössbauer results; the same measurement restated by the authors in Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science 4 (2011), Figure 1 and the paragraph following it
Contamination is addressed by design rather than by argument: each series grows the same culture in four flasks — light water without manganese, light water with manganese sulphate, heavy water without manganese, and heavy water with manganese sulphate — so iron-57 carried in by the water, the salts, the glass or the air would appear in the control flasks too, and it is found only in the fourth.Experimental method; cross-combination of nutrient media, restated in Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science 4 (2011), pages 148 to 149
The authors read the result as a low-energy nuclear reaction occurring in a living, growing system rather than as chemistry, and in their later work report the same route running about twenty times more strongly in mixed multi-species microbiological associations than in single-strain cultures, with the manganese in the flask falling as the iron-57 rises.Authors’ interpretation; developed in Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science 4 (2011), abstract and Figure 4
What would settle it is an independent group running the same four-flask protocol with the same paired readout — Mössbauer gamma resonance for iron-57 and thermal-ionisation mass spectrometry for the isotope ratios — on the same cultures, and reporting the manganese decrease alongside the iron-57 increase.The measurement pair the authors themselves rely on; Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science 4 (2011), Mössbauer and mass-spectrometry section

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4479-7_197

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

LICENCE. A two-page contribution, pages 441 to 442, to the Springer Netherlands volume ‘Spectroscopy of Biological Molecules: New Directions’ (1999); the Crossref record carries no licence at all and no Creative Commons statement appears on the chapter, so this page reproduces none of it. Springer’s chapter page refuses automated access from here. The summary and the claims below are written from the published abstract, from the authors’ first report of the result at the Sixth International Conference on Cold Fusion (‘Experimental discovery of the phenomenon of low-energy nuclear transmutation of isotopes, Mn55 to Fe57, in growing biological cultures’, Proceedings volume 2, pages 687 to 693, 1996), and from the authors’ own open-access restatement of the same measurements and controls in the Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, volume 4 (2011), pages 146 to 160, which reproduces the Mössbauer spectrum of the one-line cultures as its Figure 1. Related sheets on this site: /library/stm-38077a857a and /library/stm-444129e3db.

How to cite it

Vladimir I. Vysotskii, Alia A. Kornilova, Igor I. Samoylenko (1999) Mossbauer investigation of the phenomenon of isotope (Mn55 to Fe57) nuclear transmutation in growing biological cultures doi:10.1007/978-94-011-4479-7_197

Where it sits in the curriculum

Lattice confinement fusion