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# Biological Transmutations

By:
Louis Kervran

BREAKING NEWS!!! LEAD INTO GOLD! Scientists Report Lab Success in Transmuting Lead into Gold. Exclusive Report to the Bionutrient Food Association. READ IT HERE!!

That would get everyone's attention, yes? But really, these days, who cares? I would rather have bought Intel at $6. Now, there's a gold mine. The fact is, we haven't had much success transmuting lead into gold, and what we have transmuted usually turns out to be radio-active. But what if everything around us, including us, was transmuting elements all the time without giving it a moment's thought? You would think that would be big news---and you would be wrong. I have been reading in the fields of nutrition and agriculture for years and this is the first I have heard of it even if the ideas have been around since 1799. Vauquelin, a French chemist found that hens excreted in feces and egg more lime than existed in the oats he fed them. In 1822, another French man, Choubard, germinated same watercress seeds in an inert dish (glass) and found that the young plants contained minerals that did not exist in the seeds. In 1844, Vogel found that watercress plants contained more sulfur than was in the seeds when none was added. In 1875, Von Herzeele concluded that there was a transmutation of elements occurring when he grew plants in a well-studied medium (sic), and found discrepancies in the weights of magnesium. In 1960 these studies were published by Baranger, but he was scooped by Louis Kervan, who in 1959 published the results of his years of experiments and announced to the world that not only molecules but atoms themselves can be transformed. Naturally, Kervran was ridiculed but he also received some strong support. Ultimately, scientists from around the world and the governments of Russia and China invited him to come and train their scientists.

He published a number of books on the subject and three of those books have been translated and condensed into this English language edition. The author, Abehsera, traveled to France to talk with Kervran before he died and has tried his best to make the ideas understandable. However, this book is composed of the results of experiments that Kervran did and is thus very densely written. (If you read that a lot here it is because most of the books on the topics we try to teach are actually textbooks, however they may be presented to the public).

Elements are the simplest form of matter, the building blocks of all matter. They are composed of sub-atomic particles which are all the same from one element to another - it is the atoms that are different and unique. Iron found on meteorites is the same as that found here on Earth and that will hold true for all elements. Each element has an immutable number of protons in the center of the atom which defines that particular element and, a variable number of neutrons (neutral charge) which determines the particular isotope of the element (although twenty elements have no isotopes and tin has 10). In its elemental form, an atom has an electron shell with a number of electrons equal to the number of protons. Certain elements can add or give up electrons at which point they become ions or, an element with its electrons out of balance with its protons. Positive ions (cations) have fewer electrons than protons and negative ions (anions) have more electrons than protons. Positive ions attract negative ions and form compounds but these are not transmutations, they are merely chemical in action, such as sodium and chorine combining to make NaCl, or common table salt.

The outer electron shell of an atom shell wants to be full—if you have an element with six or seven of eight places full it will want to gain one or two electrons. If you have a shell that has only one or two electrons in the shell it will want to lose one or two to empty that shell. Chlorine has a shell with seven so it wants to gain one making it a negative/anion, whereas calcium and potassium want to lose their outer electrons and become positive/cations. As I have said before, it's not rocket science but it is soil science. Oops! I meant quantum physics.....

So, that brings us to the transmutation of elements. By which is meant, that elements combine in ways that change their atomic number and become another element entirely which process is biological, uses a minute amount of energy and is reversible- that is, the elements that have combined can go back to their original form. It needs to be said that many scientists do not believe that the elements work this way but Professor Kervran has shown by numerous experiments that when the facts are completely explained and all arguments against are eliminated, or as Sherlock Holmes would say, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth", you find, against all preconceived notions, that elements in biological systems transmute.

Professor Kervran did a long experiment on humans working in the heat of the Sahara Desert. It is dangerous to stay too long in the sun and heat of the Sahara but these men were working on hard metallic platforms all day in the hot summer sun. Systematic research was done with the help of a military doctor and his assistants. One team was followed for six months. Everything they ate and drank was measured and everything they excreted was measured, weighed and reported. The balance sheet showed that during great heat the potassium excreted through perspiration greatly increased. The workers were given salt tablets to suck on during the day to increase their sodium. More potassium was excreted than the workers were consuming. (note, excess potassium kills). Then there was the thermal balance sheet. The men worked in temperatures greater than body temperature and the men averaged 4,085 kilocalories per day in of ingested food for the six months reaching more than 7,000 kilocalories per day in high summer, Due to the heat, perspiration did not drip but evaporated immediately and the workers averaged 4.12 liters of perspiration per day. It takes 540 kilocalories to evaporate one liter of water. With the imbalance in heat the workers should have died of hyperthermia, that is, they should have cooked from the inside out: 540 X 4.12= 2,225 kilocalories, and 4,085 – 2,225 = 1860 kilocalories per day so where did this excess heat go? Kervran "came to the conclusion that it was sodium which, disappearing to become potassium, created an endothermic reaction (thus causing heat to be absorbed.)" He said that we instinctively consume more salt in dry or hot conditions. He mentions the emphasis placed upon salt in the Bible and notes that salt bars were used as money in the Sahara.

This transmution of sodium to potassium was confirmed in another experiment with the Marine Militaire. This took place over eight months in laboratories where it was found that a man making a major physical effort during three hours, in a temperature of 39 degrees C with a humidity of 60%, would experience an increase of three times his usual rate of potassium in proportion to sodium, in his urine. Many studies have been done since on the behavior of sodium and potassium in heat---when sodium enters the body it is transmuted to potassium, taking heat out of the body to perform the transmutation and cooling the body. (And, if one stops to really think about it, how could evaporation alone actually cool the interior of our bodies. Some of us are many inches thick, maybe as many as eight or ten to our abdominal core. How could surface evaporation possibly cool us fast enough to keep our temperatures around 98 degrees F? Think about how long it does take to cool a pot of soup on the stove. Even if you sprayed the outside of the pot with cold water it would take many minutes. I was totally skeptical at first but I had to admit that logically it has to be an endothermic sodium to potassium transmutation that takes the heat out of our deep muscles and organs. And, by the way, our brains use about 20% of our blood supply so how do we cool that dense, moist organ?) During a fever our bodies maintain the higher temperature by the same sodium to potassium transmutation and then the body gets rid of the excess potassium in urine.

While the transmutations of elements in our bodies are endlessly fascinating our focus is on plants. As early as 1850, Von Herzeele found that germinating seeds without a supply of calcium had an increase of calcium in the young plants analyzed 30 days after they germinated. P.Baranger at l'Ecole Polytechnique de Paris thought that Von Herzeele's experiments were not precise enough and redid them with doubly distilled water as single distillation was not pure enough and obtained the same results. The germinating seeds produced their own calcium. Hens without calcium in their diets can transmute mica which contains some silicate of potassium to calcium in less than a day going from soft shells to hard, complete shells in 20 hours. Potassium can also be created from calcium. That is, Ca – H = K. Calcium and potassium are only one proton away from each other, Ca being 20 and K being 19. With the addition of one H (with one proton) to the Ca we get the K and if we take away one H from the Ca we end up with K again. For a good periodic chart to reference, click here. Calcium in lime walls at the seaside exude saltpeter or potassium nitrate which can be scraped off the wall. (Saltpeter is one of the ingredients of gunpowder along with sulfur and charcoal).

Calcium can also be made from Si or silicon: Si + C = Ca, or silicon plus carbon equals calcium. That silica changes into limestone, which is high in calcium, has been known since antiquity. Horsetail, an herb rich in silica has been used for re-calcification. It also helps heal tuberculosis by re-calcifying the lung caverns. Spectacular results have been seen in repairing broken bones with the use of organic silica. A chick just hatched has a skeleton of bones made of calcium although there is insufficient calcium in the egg to produce those bones. There is, however, a lot of silica in the membranes that produce the egg. It has never been proved that calcium migrates from the shell to the chick.

The chapter on the magnesium-calcium relationship says,"The harvesting of crops involves the removal of the soil's magnesium. Nevertheless, it is rare to find an author who advises restitution of magnesium to the soil. Quite simply because in most fields magnesium is inexhaustible. There is a magnesium autogenesis which has remained one of the enigmas of agronomy." Sea animals which make their shells from calcium while living in the sea which has an average calcium saturation of 0.042% (not much) still make their shells within a day or two after molting. Since the shell of a crab of 17X10 cm weighs 350 gm we can see that the crab is busy transmuting magnesium dissolved in the seawater into calcium for its shell. A molting crayfish was placed in water from which all calcium had been precipitated and the crayfish made its calcium shell anyway. Experiments with calves show that a deficiency of magnesium reduces the calcium in the blood and muscles causing tetany or convulsion and finally death. Giving the calves calcium did not bring the calcium level up but administering magnesium did. Researchers studied a group of calves given an overdose of Mg and another with a deficiency and found after 4 weeks that the supplemented group weighed 75kg and the deficient group weighted only 65kg. The equation for this transmutation is: 12Mg+8O =20Ca in which the reaction is reversible.

Earthworms inhabit good soils by the hundreds of thousands per acre. Their glands secret CO3Ca, sic. (we write this CaCO3 ) or limestone, and this changes the Ph of the soil where earthworms abide. They leave 23 tons of digested soil on the surface of an acre of soil per year and a greater but unknown amount below the soil surface. These castings, as they are called, are equal to a farmer spreading manure four times a year. They are five times richer in N, two times richer in Ca, two and a half times richer in Mg, seven times richer in P and eleven times richer in K than the surrounding soil. In short, they are manufactories of minerals. As an aside, Spanish Moss, Tillandsia, grows on copper wires (and trees) and has 17% Fe2O3, iron oxide, in ashes but almost no copper. With no contact with the soil and no such elements floating around in the air or rainwater where does the iron come from?

Inside our intestines bacteria live which transmute carbohydrates to nitrogen. Researchers put a man on a complete fast and he rejected 11.9 g of N per day, (1/5 to 1/10 as fecal matter). When given sugar only 6.3 g were excreted per day. They concluded that the smaller amount excreted was due to the bacteria in the gut making N out of the carbohydrates in the sugar and needing less from the body reserves. Carnivores, which consume few if any carbohydrates do not produce N, nor do they excrete it. Instead it is used in their bodies to make the carbohydrates necessary for life. Conversely, herbivores, which consume only a small amount of N in their food excrete generous amounts of it. A two year old ox excretes 13 times more N than a man of the same weight. Remember, it is the bacteria which perform these transmutations, we humans are not nearly sophisticated enough. Plants make nitrogen (and amino acids are made of N). In A.Moyse,s book, "Respiration and Nitrogenous Metabolism, he cites an experiment done on leaves plucked from their parent plant. He put them in the dark in a controlled medium. The leaves began to decline at day four, which decline accelerates after the sixth day and death occured at day ten. The total N in the leaves on day one is: 13.64mg and the total N at death is: 22.8 mg in the form of mineral nitrogen, NH3. That is a 70% increase in nitrogen and at the same time 82 mg of carbon disappeared. Moyse did not know where the carbon went but he wrote," The direct origin by liberation of the pre-existing amides in the proteins and the indirect origin by conversion of the aspartic acid are not sufficient to explain this increase." Yes, that is how these researchers really talk, always a hit at cocktail parties. Manures have a reduction of proteinic nitrogen and an endogenous formation (literally, proceeding from within), of NH3, from the carbohydrates of straw and cellulose.

Sulfur has 16 protons in its nucleus and oxygen has 8 , so 2 oxygen molecules make one sulfur molecule. They are next to one another in the periodic table and share some properties. Sulfur is very corrosive at high temperatures, (oxygen is always corrosive at normal temperatures—oxidation). Sulfur is as vital as nitrogen and is fabricated by living organisms. This can be easily proven experimentally in plants and, of course, we all know that eggs produce sulfur because when they rot and combine with H we get the noxious smelling hydrogen sulfide.

Manganese and iron work hand in hand in the fields where farmers and researchers have noted that an excess of manganese produces the same effects as a lack of iron. Excess manganese impeded the assimilation of iron and vice versa. They aren't sure what causes this effect but because plants require specific bacteria for the absorption of manganese and iron, they are studying the use of these bacteria to enrich manganese ores. Iron and manganese are separated by a single proton. In 1963 (yes, that long ago) Professor Pierre Baranger verified that during germination manganese disappeared while an equal amount of iron appeared. Baranger germinated seeds with a soluble manganese salt added to the water. He found that a great part of the Mn disappeared and an equal amount of Fe appeared, the weight of the disappearing Mn being 25 times the weight of Mn in the seed. The seeds have enough energy in their diastases (enzymes that catalyze or break apart), to remove the Mn thus creating good conditions to germinate in. Some plants cannot fabricate Mn during some phases of growth and must find it in the soil but only in the presence of the manganic bacteria although an overly acidic soil will inhibit the absorption of Mn.

Kervran notes that oats take out of the impermeable, clayey soils more sulfur than there is in the soil - unfortunately, the condensation of three different books into this one does not give enough specific information to deeply understand what is going on. His point is that after years of cultivation, more sulfur, zinc and manganese are taken from the soil than there are present in the soil, and none is added back. Thus, he questions where those minerals come from since they are absolutely present in the harvested crop. He says, "Biological transmutation explains the basic process of biological agriculture, whatever the specific method. The biodynamic method as well as other methods involving active processes, uses decoctions (rich in oligo-elements) to balance the acidity of the soil. The oligo elements are indispensable to the enzymes; the enzymes are in turn responsible for the biological transmutations. (Oligo , or oligonucleotide, is a short nucleic acid polymer used in the synthesis of DNA).

Leaving a field fallow has been a hallmark of agriculture from the beginning. People noticed that the fallowed field regained its fertility. A Swiss, Phiffer, author of "Fecondite de la Terre, saw that daisies grow where there is no limestone and when the ashes of these flowering plants are assayed it is found that they are rich in lime. The plants die and enrich the soil, year by year, with lime. No one has determined from whence it comes. Geraniums grown in a sand of pure silica, watered with rain or distilled water with no organic element added produce lime in addition to other elements. The sand used had naturally occurring bacteria, not sterilized sand.

There is a chapter on human medicine in which calcium, silica, potassium and magnesium are discussed which is worth reading in that it explains in a very rudimentary way that elements in the human body do not always act as expected.

According to Kervran, the lighter elements will transmute and only with elements with which they can gain or lose a proton and some combine H. So, Mg increases by Na11 + H1 which becomes Mg12. M12 +O8 becomes Ca20 in a reversible transmutation. It should be noted that Kervran devised a system for writing these equations that looks more like: 40Ca---1H :=:39K, with the numbers 20, 1 and 19, respectively, set below the 40, the 1 and the 39, in small, subscript numbers which I cannot reproduce.

John Mattingly says in the introduction to the second edition of this book, There are some points to consider when thinking about biological transmutation. The first is that there is a problem measuring living systems in a controlled, totally isolated 'scientific' manner. You can't kill a living system, and then pretend that it is analogous to a similar but living system. This makes it difficult to study living systems with traditional chemistry and physics. Secondly, a living system is an open system, complex and ever changing. To isolate it from the natural world is to already alter the parameters of any experiment. Also, growing plants in sterile environments is simply not the way Nature works. Thirdly, biological processes are at best periodic, and at works fluctuating. This means that the experimental protocol must allow for natural cycles. Living matter of all kinds has a number of self-evident properties such as evolution, symbiosis and bacterial pleomorphism, sic. (Bacterial pleomorphism has had its definition changed over the last century, check wiki for more info). None of these things has a scientific explanation; we do not have an acceptable theory of evolution. The thing is, we do not have to believe that something works a particular way in order for it to actually work. If one is stuck in the Lavoisier universe where elements don't transmute, and many are, then what is necessary is more sophisticated research, done with an open mind by researchers who aren't going to skew the results to fit a preconceived notion.

Thank you for bearing with me for this involved review. I would like to illustrate something about our body of knowledge. Back around 1960, when people my age were in 7th grade, there was an educational movie about plants, and in the section about photosynthesis, when it got to the part about what actually happens during photosynthesis, a little man was on the screen pulling down a window shade over the plant in the background and saying, "and then for reasons known only to God"...photosynthesis occurs. By the time we were all in high school the details of photosynthesis were in our biology textbooks.