Transmutation of elements

One scientist that worked in the transmutation of elements was Prof. Pierre Baranger, chief of the Laboratory for Organic Chemistry at the ÉcolePolytechnique in Paris.  

Prof. Baranger in the late 1950s repeated the seed growth experiments of von Herzeele (conducted and published from 1876 to 1883), in which elements appeared to be produced in seeds sprouted in distilled water alone (based on analysis of the ashed seeds and plants). Von Herzeele had found that phosphorus went to sulfur, calcium to phosphorus, magnesium into calcium, etc.—many of the findings that Kervran would later ratify.  Baranger reported his work in January 1958 at a prestigious scientific institute in Switzerland. In an interview with the magazine Science et Vie in 1959, he said:

 "My results look impossible, but there they are. I have taken every precaution. I have repeated the experiments many times. I have made thousands of analyses for years. I have had the results verified by third parties who did not know what I was about. I have used several different methods. I changed my experimenters. But there is no way out; we have to submit to the evidence: plants know the old secret of the alchemists. Every day under our very gaze they are transmuting elements. . .I have been teaching chemistry at the École Polytechnique for twenty years, and believe me, the laboratory which I direct is no den of false science. But I have never confused respect for science with the taboos imposed by intellectual conformism. For me, any meticulously performed experiment is a homage to science even if it shocks our ingrained habits. Von Herzeele’sexperiments were too few to be absolutely convincing. But their results inspired me to control them with all the precaution possible in a modern lab and to repeat them enough times so that they would be statistically irrefutable. That’s what I’ve done."

No matter how solid the experimental evidence, biological transmutation, like cold fusion and inorganic low-energy transmutation, flies in the face of a paradigm that began at the very foundation of chemistry in the late eighteenth century: elements retain their identities—they do not change into other elements. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), widely considered to be the “father of chemistry” or even the “Newton of chemistry,” according to Isaac Asimov,3 is responsible for that paradigm. We may regard this as a brilliant insight that was perhaps necessary to help make sense of the bewildering facts that emerged from centuries of alchemical experimentation. Moreover, the paradigm is ordinarily true, but the problem with the dogma launched by Lavoisier (ironically at the very time his contemporary Vauquelinwas questioning the origin of calcium in chicken egg shells!) is that it has been too powerful, too rigid, and too enduring.

Lavoisier’s scientific career ended on May 8, 1794, when he was guillotined during the French Revolution for having ties to “tax farmers.”3 His paradigm of element immutability survived the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 and the host of other conventionally accepted nuclear reactions. Unfortunately, it has grown so strong over two centuries that resistance to cold fusion, low-energy nuclear reactions, and especially biological transmutation remains intense. However, prior to the explosion of biochemical knowledge in the mid to late twentieth century at least one significant voice was raised in support of greater circumspection. Louis de Broglie, one of the luminaries of modern quantum mechanics is quoted by Kervran: “It is premature to reduce the vital process to the quite insufficiently developed conceptions of nineteenth and even twentieth century physics and chemistry.”   

From:

 http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue34/bookreview_biotrans.html