In The Scientific Community
Kervran was largely ignored by the scientific community with scarce literature citation and no effect on mainstream models of biology, although the quantum physicist Olivier Costa de Beauregard considered his work valuable. Neither is he well known for promoting a pathological science or pseudoscience although he received the Ig Nobel Prize for Physics in 1993.
Mainstream biology doesn't find any anomalies in the nutrient uptake and release of hens, plants, or any other organism. All biological functions can be explained through chemical diffusion and chemical reactions requiring no nuclear reactions. Kervran's claim that N2 was converted to CO does not consider the vast chemical pathways that can convert oxygen and carbon containing molecules into CO, or that the oil field works nutrient diet may have been misreported or mis-measured.
While scraping the sweat off oil workers certainly leaves room for measurement errors, the usual dismissals of Kervran's work that gratuitously asserts that chemists and medical doctors are incompetent are not acceptable. For example, the iron and steel industry supported some rather elaborate tests in England, Germany and Europe all of which showed carbon monoxide in the blood of welders but none in the air. Thus, it's a true mystery.
However, there does not appear to be any evidence to suggest that Kervran's transmutations are the only or even the most fitting solution to the puzzle of CO poisoning. Obviously this situation is far too complex to be used as any proof of biological transmutations. Other experiments where Lavoisier's law is apparently violated are more suggestive, but given the assertion that these experiments must be performed on living subjects, the creation of an experiment that could give definitive proof of such a violation is exceptionally difficult.
The greatest problem with Kervran's theories is that the basic atomic reactions have never been observed in physics. To be sure, today, transmutations of elements are scientifically accepted as real and proved, but energies required to produce them are beyond biological levels in the extreme. Kervran's response suggesting neutral currents as sources and sinks of this energy remains to be shown. Basically until physics can demonstrate that low energy transmutations with neutrino beams or similar particles actually can take place between the single atoms in question, there will be doubt regarding biological transmutations. If a reaction cannot be demonstrated in a microscopic sense, then the biological macroscopic measurements will always be questioned.
Read more about this topic: Corentin Louis Kervran
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