At 11:43 AM 10/23/2010, Jones Beene wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
> On the one hand, it really does seem like a long shot, and on the other,
damn! Mossbauer spectroscopy is highly specific about Fe-57.
True. Is this paper available yet? Assuming the measurements are correct-
how does this isotope benefit the organism unless it is to detoxify water
from cobalt-60 which is common in reactors?
Perhaps the organism needs iron for something.
There is a whole series of results from Vyosotskii, and most of his
work seems to be on decontamination, a big issue in Russia after Chernobyl.
It's possible that the nuclear transformation capacity is a
side-effect of something else. Lack of understood utility should be
even less of an objection to his observations than problems with
theoretical possibility.
The problem there would be conservation of spin, and or the non-existence of
a viable or known reaction pathway, if the reaction is supposed to involve
an accelerated alpha decay, for instance.
That's not the deinococcus radiodurans result.
I have the ACS Sourcebook with a paper on this, but that's hard to come by.
The two papers I have looked at are too light on this kind of necessary
detail to make the prima facie case. Can you recommend a convincing paper
from the LENR-CANR site?
There is a book published in Russia, Vysotskii and Kornilova,
"Nuclear Fusion and Transmutation of Isotopes in Biological Systems,
"MIR" Publishing House, Moscow, 2003. Author description at
http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/books/Reviews/Vysotskii1ByVysotskii.shtml
The book appears to be available from Infinite Energy...
https://www.mv.com/ipusers/zeropoint/secure/FORMS/onlinestore.html
... as is Kevran.
For starters, I've been spelling Vysotskii's name wrong.... arrggh.
I found specific information about the experiments with deinococcus
radiodurans, more than I'd seen before, at googlebooks, searching for
"Vysotskii radiodurans".
A lot of detail about these experiments was visible. The book found is
Metal Ions in Biology and Medicine, Volume 5. Expensive, $70 used
paperback on Amazon.
http://books.google.com/books?id=WjSZx-r0WsMC&pg=PA81&dq=Vysotskii+radiodurans&hl=en&ei=XSzDTPWPIcT68AaGkYGyBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Vysotskii%20radiodurans&f=false
P. 77, the first page of the paper, was missing, but the rest of the
paper could be seen, except for most of the references.
What strikes me is that the experiments appear to be fairly simple.
It looks like, with care and samples of the same organisms, which
should be obtainable, I'd expect, this should be replicable. I have
found no sign that anyone has attempted this.
The methods are generally the methods of biology. I'd assume that it
could be possible for a student at some university to obtain
Mossbauer spectrograms, looking for Fe-57. But, back to the same
problem: this seems so way out, so unlikely, that a student, even if
successful in replicaiton, could face a complete lack of recognition
for the work. It's possible it could be published, though, which might help.
And if the student doesn't succeed in replicating, what then? What
I'd hope for is that such research would be published, in some form,
anyway. Negative replication doesn't prove that the original research
was defective, because there are many things that can go wrong, but
we should know how many people have tried. If a lot of people try and
find nothing, then we'd want to very carefully examine the original
research. Ideally, replication efforts would be guided by the
original researcher, to maximize chances of successful replication.
Once results are replicated, if they can be replicated, then those
experiments could be studied to see if an artifact can be identified.
That's how it's supposed to work, for something unusual like this!
It was never done with Pons and Fleischmann, so we should all be
sensitive to this problem. Rejection without experimental basis is
very dangerous, in terms of possible perpetuation of ignorance.
I cannot consider Vysotskii as conclusive without independent
confirmation, and I'll note that Storms mentions Vysotskii this way:
Even various single-cell organisms have been reported to produce
nuclear products when grown in D2O as well as in H2O, but in the
latter case with less evidence supporting the claims.
Then, after a doscussion of Kevran, Komaki, and Vysotskii et al, he writes:
The author realizes that many people find a claim for occurrence of
nuclear reactions in living cells hard to accept and that many more
replications are required before the claim can be fully justified.
Nevertheless, the evidence is growing and needs to be debated in the
context of cold-fusion.
I think I might have been more conservative than this. I'm not aware
of any replications of Vysotskii, and what has been "replicated" is
only the general idea of biological transmutation. There is enough,
though, in my view, to justify a need for replication efforts. This
is cross-disciplinary, and I assume that some decent work would
receive fair consideration at a journal like Naturwissenschaften.
