He sprouted seeds of cress... in crushed glass deprived of sulfate or of any other sulfurous compound; he watered them with distilled water, covered them with a glass cloche and analyzed the air of the room, so as to determine the sulfur... A few months later, the adult plants with ripe seeds, were dried and burnt with a mixture of potassium nitrate and potassium carbonate; the result was that a quantity of sulfuric acid double that which was contained in the seeds was produced. These experiments demonstrate that either sulfur is not a simple element or that the source which produced the sulfur has remained unknown, despite all the care which had been taken to discover it... (1)

These results, obtained by taking all possible precautions, confirm the general conclusions proposed by V. Herzeele and lead one to think that under certain conditions the plants are capable of forming elements which did not exist before in the external environment.

[The practical consequences] cannot be underestimated... Certain plants would bring to the soil some elements useful for the growth of other plants; this would lead us especially to define and revise the current notions on fallows, rotations, mixed crop, fertilizers and the manuring of infertile soils. Nothing prevents us from thinking that certain plants are capable of producing rare elements of industrial importance....

In the sub-atomic field, the plant supplies us with an example of transformation which we are not capable of performing in the laboratory without bringing into action particles of high-energy... It seems that the theoretical consequences in the field of sub-atomic physics are not negligible.

The vital phenomenon is not of a chemical order... The nucleus of the atom in light elements is quite different from what nuclear physics regards as the average type, the latter having value only for the heavy elements... Nature moves particles from one nucleus to another ¾ particles such as hydrogen and oxygen nuclei and, in some cases, the nuclei of carbon and lithium. There is thus a transmutation... Biological transmutation is a phenomenon completely different from the atomic fissions or fusions of physics... it reveals a property of matter not seen prior to this work. (4, 7-13)

All transmutations proposed by Kervran have two traits in common: (1) The initial and final nuclei differ by the addition or subtraction of a piece of matter, e.g., a proton (a hydrogen nucleus...), an alpha particle (a helium nucleus), a nucleus of oxygen or one of its isotopes, or perhaps some other familiar nuclei; (2) There is an energy excess or deficit in the order of 0.01 atomic mass units (a.m.u.)... or 20 electron masses, or 10 MeV, or 1.6 x 10^-12 joules. The mass equivalent of this energy gap is of course needed in order to have the Lavoisier principle safe... This energy gap is very much larger than those occurring in chemical reactions. For example, if ... hens are indeed transmuting potassium into calcium (which is an exo-energetic reaction), the power they are radiating is so huge that it would, if in the luminous (electromagnetic) form, set everything on fire all around! [In energetic terms, such flux would be equal to 10¹⁵ MeV/cm²/second, or 160 watts/cm².] Can we then imagine some sort of quasi-occult form into which the 'Kervran power gap' may be radiated (or from which it may be absorbed in the case of endo-energetic reactions)? No reasonable answer was available until... a bold theoretical assumption, due to Weinberg in 1967, turned out as experimentally true. Due to this 'neutral current hypothesis' we are allowed to write such nuclear reactions as:

p + v « p' + v' ; or: p + v « p' + v' ; or: p « p' + v + v

where p denotes a proton, v a neutrino, and v the anti-neutrino. We even have two sorts of neutrinos to play with: the electronic and the muonic one.

With this we can in principle handle the proton type of Kervran's reactions (and also the other one in analogous fashion. One of the two protons in the reaction would be a quasi-free one, that is one with only the trivial, chemical binding. The other one would be bound inside the nucleus. Of course we then have the problem of getting the proton, with its electric charge, through the potential barrier of the nucleus, by the so-called 'tunnel effect' (a typical effect of wave mechanics). But this is part of a problem already mentioned: Life playing the information game, the field being the nucleus, and the rules being those of the wavelike probability calculus... If the Kervran hen does radiate the power gap in the form of neutrinos and/or anti-neutrino, this will be done in the quietest fashion, and go on completely unnoticed.

Can we also handle in this way the endo-energetic reactions? Fortunately Nature provides us with an appropriate supply, because there are quite a few neutrinos and anti-neutrinos flying around us as part of the so-called cosmic rays. By another chance the upper limit of the energy per cosmic particle is so high that the 0.01 a.m.u. Kervran needs are very easily available.

Finally, like the proton or the a -particle, the neutrino or anti-neutrino is something abundantly available... which makes it convenient for use by Life.

On the other hand, the extremely 'weak interaction' of the neutrino with other particles, which we have just found so convenient for avoiding the adverse effects of the Kervran power gap, now... faces us with great hostility. For how are we to reconcile this with the hypothesis that the hen is a furious neutrino source...? How can we simultaneously explain that the poultry keeper, and indeed the hen itself, do not feel the neutrino Niagara and that the source of it is inside the egg factory of the hen?

This is the very Gordian knot of the information game problem, the nuclear physics analogon, if you like, of the so-called catalysis problem of ordinary bio-chemistry. The only tentative answer that I can think of, one I deem quite acceptable in principle, is that what looks like a flat self-contradiction in the physical realm of 'blind statistical prediction', retarded waves and causality, is no more a contradiction at all if we assume that Life is playing with finality, advanced waves, and 'blind statistical retrodiction'... Life knows how to... induce probability decreasing processes. (2)

For Costa de Beauregard, the apparent discordance with the postulate of the equivalence between mass and energy can be replaced by the postulate of emission-absorption of an occult mass bound to a particle of complete spin; it is thus that the neutrino with a 1/2 spin was invented... you would need a particle of complete spin with normally very weak interactions with matter, but 'catalyzed' biologically; it would not displease me, within this perspective, to try the classic 'graviton' with spins 2 or 0, or a non-classical neo-graviton with spins 2, 1, and 0...

This particle seems to have a mass of 0.011 a.m.u. or 1.8 x 10^-26 gram in reactions with +H⁺...

I had not been speaking of energy, for here it was a question of an equivalence, not an identity... I prefer to hold to the notion, as measured at the mass spectrometer, of a difference of masses, for the problem of energy, in my reactions, can be written only in a very simplistic way by application to Einstein's law. There is certainly something else here, and therein lies the whole problem.

In the terrestrial atmosphere there exists a particle in abundance with a rest mass m, and a maupertusien mass (or kinetic mass)... which is more than sufficient to assure the Kervran balances: the mu meson of cosmic rays...

It is quite admissible to conceive of it as absorbed, then, re-emitted during the course of a nuclear transition of the Kervran type which, moreover, implies a 'virtual neutrino' (emitted, then reabsorbed).

There is a second important problem to solve. To get the H to fuse with the N there is an enormous barrier of repulsing electric potential to pass through. Evidently this is by the tunnel effect. The theory which I am working up ... thus unites aspects of the theory of beta disintegration... and the theory of alpha disintegration... Like you, I believe that the configuration of an atomic or molecular electron cloud has a real word to say on the subject.

In a Petri dish 9 cm. in diameter I started germinating 50 oat seeds. The culture continued for 6 weeks or 3.6 million seconds give or take a few ten thousands of seconds... The area of 'cosmic interaction' was 63 cm³... During this time on this surface 3.9 mg of K were transmuted into Ca; this must be ~ 6 x 10¹⁹ atoms of K transmuted in 3.6 x 10⁶ seconds or 1.8 x 10¹³ atoms per second or 2.6 x 10¹¹ per cm²/second. The proportion of K transmuted was ~ 46% in 6 weeks. This integration of results for the phenomenon is not constant: it is imperceptible during the first days when one witnesses the synthesis of enzymes which will provoke the transmutations; even at the end of a week the effect is hardly to be noticed. It develops rapidly during the 2nd and 3rd weeks, then slows down during the 4th week... The phenomenon seems to be asymptotic and at the end of the 6th week transmutation progresses only very slowly.. Which demonstrates yet once again that the action of the ambient is insufficient, that there is an energy regulated by the metabolism of the germination and growth which is at the origin of these transmutations... Obviously this calculation was one for a macro-section and not for the effective section... Moreover, there is in biology an important phenomenon which must not be overlooked: some molecules assemble in helix shapes (DNA and RNA for example). There are also some oriented assemblages which polarize light, most often to the left. These oriented constructions have an oriented electromagnetic field, and a molecule such as DNA can be compared to a solenoid in which charged particles (mu^- for example) are somehow partly channeled in the interior, and thus concentrated...

The microorganisms responsible for the phenomenon would find in the natural radiation a sufficient store of neutrinos of 10 MeV and more than they need... A diminution of this alimentation would consist of an equal numerical flux of neutrinos of very low energy to be put in the free interstices of the natural distribution. It is a problem of the symmetric information... in which (in thermodynamic terms) the difference between the 'heat' gained from the hot source (high energy neutrinos) and that given to the cold source (low energy neutrinos) is converted not into work, but into internal energy, or into the rest mass of the machine, which is not cyclical... Analogous comments apply to the case... implying an absorption of a pair, neutrino and anti-neutrino, of an average energy of 5 MeV... [The reactions] avail themselves of an abundant hot source like a geyser (the neutrinos of average energy of the cosmic radiation within the atmosphere) and of an immense cold source like an ocean, 'Fermi's lake' of very low energy neutrinos.

Coal comes from schists, fabricated in situ, by high compression that produced the reactions: Si ® C + O. If O could not escape, and was compressed as well, one would have O + O ® S, from which one gets sulfurous coals. If there was no deformation, the coal remains mixed with argil to produce ampelite.

Graphite cannot be of vegetal origin, in which case another origin must be found for it, and I propose the silicium of these Archaean rocks. As for diamonds... here, too, one observes the presence of silicates, thus of silicon... In this way one can explain why all coal deposits contain silicon (up to 20%, or even 40%, and more) which form 'ashes'. The great amounts of silicon might be an indication that the transmutation from Si to C + O was imperfect, incomplete.