I can understand why biological transmutation makes some people edgy.
When I first came across this, I was edgy too. Ah, well, I thought,
cold fusion being so widely rejected, the conferences have to be open
to new ideas.
Then I read the actual papers. Storms reports it pretty well. I
happen to have a piece of background that made Vyosotskii's work with
Mossbauer spectroscopy appeal to me; I was a sophomore at Caltech
when Mossbauer, who was there, had just won the Nobel Prize, and we
did a Mossbauer experiment in physics lab. (Feynman, by the way,
taught my two years of physics at Caltech. Luck of the draw, I
suppose.) The technique is insanely precise, I don't believe it's
possible that his detection of Fe-57 was an artifact. Many people,
seeing that spectrogram, wouldn't get that.
If cold fusion or other low-energy nuclear reactions are possible, as
it surely seems they are, there is nothing particularly weird about
proteins, which can create very precise molecular conditions,
accomplishing it, particularly if it conferred some survival
advantage under even rare conditions. So ... has anyone tried to
replicate Vyosotskii's work? Mossbauer spectroscopy isn't terribly
rare or expensive or difficult, and the experiment seems terminally
simple, one would want to make sure that one had the right bacterial
cultures to have a good shot at replication.
Vyosotkii's work with mass reduction of radioactivity is likewise
something pretty simple, if it works. Measuring the radioactivity of
a sample is straightforward, and chemical processes should ordinarily
have little effect (though there are known effects of chemical
environment on half-life, a little-recognized accepted example of
CANR). Again, any replications?
