Corentin Louis Kervran

Corentin Louis Kervran (Quimper, Finistère (Brittany) 1901 - 2 February 1983) was a French scientist best known for his defense of the unconventional belief in biological transmutation. He had received a degree as a physics engineer in 1925. In WWII he was part of the French Resistance. He was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, Director of Conferences of the Paris University, Member of Conseil d'Hygiene de la Seine, a Member of the Commission du Conseil Supérieur de la Recherche Scientifique (1966). He was the recognised expert on radiation poisoning for the French government since 1945. His use of the word transmutation led his scientific work to be associated with alchemy and alienated him from the majority of mainstream scientific community. The most readable English introduction to his work can be found inThe Secret Life of Plants in a chapter called "Alchemists in the garden".

To support his claims of biological transmutation, Louis Kervran cited several prior reports and conducted his own experiments. A French Navy study observed that Sahara oilfield workers excreted a daily average of 320 mg more calcium than they ingested without bone decalcification occurring. Some strange cases of industrial accidents (1955) showing CO poisoning when no CO was inhaled led Kervran to postulate the dissociation of a nitrogen molecule into carbon monoxide through the displacement of a proton at low energy. At January in 1961, he had reported this working hypothesis to Conseil d'Hygiene de la Seine and the digestive report had been published in L'usine nouvelle in 1961. His first treatise concerning to Transmutation-theory is titled "Bilan metaboliques anormaux et transmutations biologiques", which had been published in Revue generale des sciences.

There are a few examples of his work being corroborated. In 1978 a report was issued by the U.S. Army Mobility Equipment Research and Development Command proposing Magnesium adenosine triphosphate, located in the mitochondrion of the cell, provided the energy for the effects observed by Kervran and Komaki. "It was concluded that elemental transmutations were indeed occurring in life organisms and were probably accompanied by net energy gain". However this work was never followed up, and lies well outside mainstream scientific understanding of biology.