At 04:39 AM 7/11/2009, you wrote:
On Jul 10, 2009, at 5:05 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
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.
Not only is it very fringe (a bad thing to some, a good thing to
others) it would make me very nervous to order and keep around the
materials for this kind of research, despite the fact it is
harmless. A home biological lab might easily be misinterpreted!
Well, there's not much to it. To test the fast-decay of radioisotopes
would require obtaining them, but the Fe-57 production from Mn-55
requires nothing special but the culture, presumably Saccharomyces
cerevisiae T-8. S. cerevisiae is also known as Brewer's Yeast, or
Baker's Yeast, but the exact culture (T-8) might matter very much. I
searched for this and with quite a bit of difficulty found reference
to a culture called T-8.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSM288275
and there is a contact.
What if the strain doesn't matter so much?
That would reduce the difficulty to finding a Mossbauer
spectrographic resource. There is a company that does Fe-57
spectrography, but it's insanely expensive.
http://www.mossbauer.com/prices.html Like $425 per sample. So for any
kind of investigational work, one would need to set up regular access
to a spectrometer....
You might try going to LENR-CANR.org and using "biological" as the
search term for the site. It turns up Vysotskii and others.
Yeah, I've read the papers. What I don't see is any independent
confirmation -- or confirmation failure -- at all.
There has been a lot of discussion of Kervran's work with chickens.
It vaguely seems to me that someone in Bockris' group at Texas A&M
had some luck along those lines, but I could be confused. Jean-Paul
Biberian did some personal work in the biological arena:
http://membres.lycos.fr/grainedescience/
Not terribly useful.
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,
You must be in an academic lab or commercial environment.
Actually, no. I was just remembering doing the experiment. There was
just a radioisotopic source, Co-57, that decays into Fe-57, emitting
gamma rays at a precise characteristic energy, mounted on a linear
carriage driven by a motor so we could tune the velocity to
dopper-shift the radiation, and a detector that measured gamma ray
energy, I forget the details.
I'm not in any kind of lab environment at all.
Building a Mossbauer spectrographic setup might be doable. Co-57
sources are available for perhaps $75. What I don't know is what kind
of sensitivity is needed for the gamma detector. It would be much
easier for someone affiliated with a university that has the equipment.
Hmmpph!
