Vysotskii and Kornilova's 2011 Paper: Iron-57 From Manganese, the Four-Flask Design and the 35-Fold Cesium-137 Claim

"Low-energy Nuclear Reactions and Transmutation of Stable and Radioactive Isotopes in Growing Biological Systems" appeared in the Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, volume 4 (2011), pages 146–160, under the copyright of the International Society of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (ISCMNS). The authors are Vladimir I. Vysotskii (Kiev National Shevchenko University) and Alla A. Kornilova (Moscow State University). The paper gathers their earlier results in one place: the experimental design behind the manganese-to-iron claim, the reactor-water and Cs-137 deactivation runs, and their theory of how the Coulomb barrier might be bypassed. For the dossier it matters because it is where the 20-fold and 35-fold figures quoted elsewhere in the dossier are laid out with their underlying numbers. Those numbers can be checked against each other.

What the paper claims

The abstract makes two headline claims. First, stable-isotope transmutation in mixed microbial communities is said to be 20 times more effective than in pure ("one-line") cultures; the body text puts it at 10–20 times. Second, the decay of Cs-137 is said to have been accelerated 35-fold. The authors present biological transmutation as an ordinary physical process that growing cells happen to favour. They suggest it is an evolutionary response that lets organisms with a fixed set of required elements cope with an environment where those elements are unevenly available. They also acknowledge that their explanation is one possible solution among others.

The manganese-to-iron experiments

The key reaction is manganese-55 capturing a deuteron from heavy water to become iron-57. According to the paper, work 10–15 years earlier with Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae gave only a weak Mössbauer signal, about 0.2% relative absorption. The authors attribute this low efficiency to the narrow range of optimal conditions each pure culture needs, and they hypothesise that metabolic products also poison the growth medium. The printed reaction formulas and rate constants for this earlier work are inconsistent: the manganese reaction appears once with Fe51 as product, and a sodium–phosphorus reaction appears with both P51 and P31.

The newer runs used a "microbial catalyst-transmutator" (MCT): granules of concentrated syntrophic biomass (see Microbe Syntrophic Associations (MSA)), organic nutrients and a binding agent. The design used four flasks. Portions of the same culture grew in light water, light water plus MnSO4, heavy water, and heavy water plus MnSO4. Only the last flask had every ingredient the proposed reaction needs. The authors argue that Fe-57 contamination from the water, salts, glass or air would show up in other flasks too. Cultures were kept at 32 °C for 24, 48 or 72 hours; heavy-water media had to be stirred continuously. About 0.3 g of dried material went into the Mössbauer spectrometer.

The paper reports a Mössbauer resonance of about 3.4% for the association, compared with 0.2% for pure cultures. It puts the yield at about 10^17 Fe-57 nuclei, roughly 10^-5 g, per gram of dried biomass. The rate is given as (0.5–1) × 10^-6 Fe-57 nuclei per second per Mn-55 nucleus. Part of the gain is attributed to a 20-day growth period that pure cultures cannot survive in heavy water.

As a cross-check, the authors ran thermal ionisation mass spectrometry on a Finnigan MAT-262. In their table the Fe-57/Fe-56 ratio is 0.024 ± 0.002 in the light-water control and 0.051 ± 0.003 in the heavy-water flask. These are ratios to Fe-56; the natural Fe-56/Fe-57 ratio listed in the table is 41.7, against 42.5 in the control and 19.5 in the experiment. (The table's natural Fe-57 abundance of 2.2% is a share of total iron, so it is not directly comparable.) The paper says the Fe-57 concentration rose by a factor of 2–3, roughly matching the Mössbauer result. Mn-55 relative to Fe-56 is 0.15 ± 0.012 in the control and 0.13 ± 0.012 in the experiment. The authors present this fall as manganese being consumed as iron-57 appears.

Reactor water and cesium-137

The deactivation work used primary-circuit water from a water-cooled reactor at the Kiev Institute of Nuclear Research, at about 10^-4 Curie/L. It contained isotopes including Co-60, I-131, Ba-140 and La-140. The paper reports faster-than-normal loss of Ba-140 and La-140 activity in flasks with MCT over about 30 days. Its figure legend shows Co-60 decaying the same way with or without microbes. The proposed route is Ba-140 plus carbon-12 giving samarium-152, which the authors suggest could substitute for calcium.

For Cs-137, eight thin-walled closed glass flasks each held 10 ml of water containing 2×10^4 Bq of cesium. Seven contained MCT. Six of those also received one added salt: KCl, CaCO3, NaCl, FeSO4, MgSO4 or a phosphorus salt. One flask had MCT with no added salt, and one had cesium water alone. The flasks stood at 20 °C and were counted with a germanium detector every 7 days for 100 days. The control decayed with the usual ~30-year lifetime. Effective lifetimes are given as about 310 days with calcium, 380 days with MCT alone, 480 days with sodium and 10 years with excess potassium. The authors read the 310-day figure as a 35-fold speed-up. Their proposed reaction is Cs-137 plus a proton giving stable Ba-138, and they explain the potassium effect by the similar ionic radii of Ba2+ and K+.

What the document does and does not establish

• No product isotope is measured for the radioactive work. The routes to Ba-138 and Sm-152 are offered only as possible reactions. The paper reports only falling gamma count rates, not the appearance of the claimed products.
• The Cs-137 table does not reconcile. For the calcium flask it gives 266,900 counts per 10^3 s at the start and 216,800 at 100 days, and states the change as −24%. Those counts give a fall of about 19% of the starting rate, or about 23% if divided by the final rate.
• Counting geometry is not addressed. Ludwik Kowalski objected in 2005 that if cesium became concentrated in biomass or settled within a flask, the detector's count could fall without any change in the amount of Cs-137 (Ludwik Kowalski's 2005 Reading of Vysotskii's Cs-137 and Mica Decay Claims: Gas Loss, Counting Geometry and the Case for Tracers). The paper reports no check of where the cesium ended up, so it does not rule out this possibility.
• The manganese decrease is marginal. The two Mn-55 values (0.15 and 0.13) differ by less than twice their quoted uncertainties of ±0.012. Mass-spectrometric data are shown only for the control and experimental flasks, not for the other two flasks of the cross-design.
• Replication counts are not given. The paper says the series was performed with various cultures, but it does not tabulate how many runs were made or how much they varied.

The proposed mechanism

The theory section argues that ordinary tunnelling is hopeless; it gives a dd-fusion rate of about 10^-70 s^-1 for a D2 molecule. Instead, the authors invoke short-lived, nearly parabolic potential wells in growing tissue. If such a well has the right size (put at Ropt ≈ 4 Å for Mn–d) and the interaction lasts the right time, the Coulomb interaction effectively averages out. The deuteron then has a non-zero probability of being found at the manganese nucleus. Wells whose size changes as DNA, membranes and cells form would pass through that optimum. The paper credits the mechanism to Vysotskii's 1994 cold fusion conference paper. It offers no experiment that isolates the mechanism.

Related pages

• Biological Transmutation (Biotransmutation)
• Accelerated Radionuclide Deactivation
• Biological Transmutation Claims vs. Evidence: Acceleration Factors, Control Contamination and the Absence of Replication