It’s easy to imagine, from the comfy warmth given by hundreds of years of hindsight, that alchemy was a ridiculous pursuit, riddled with superstition and avarice and ultimately laughably unsuccessful. I mean, we can’t turn lead into gold, can we?

[Googles ‘Turning lead into gold’]

At least, we can’t turn lead into gold without a particle accelerator, a lot of lead, and the funding to undertake a huge loss making experiment, can we? If we could, no college roof would be safe again, or at least all college roofs would be significantly more pimped-out.

But actually, alchemists did rather a lot of important work. Take Theophrastus Phillippus Aurelius Bombastus von Hohenheim (or Paracelsus to his friends), a Swiss alchemist of the early sixteenth century. Despite being born four hundred years too early to maximise the obvious rap-based potential of such a name, old Parry managed to make a significant mark on the history books (beyond the little moustaches everyone makes on history books). Although much of his work was utterly unreadable (establishing a fine tradition maintained in all the best lab books to this day), the bits that can be accessed showed a mind with a great deal of medical foresight. Paracelsus thought disease was a localised concept, and rejected the humour-based ‘medicine’ of the day in favour of trying to cure the ill with chemicals. Given that he also rejected the developing idea of homeopathy, Paracelsus can be credited with creating the beginnings of modern pharmacology (although presumably Scientologists consider him some poisonous drug-maniac bogeyman).

TPABvH wasn’t the only BNoC in alchemy, however. One of his contemporaries, the German Georgius Agricola, described in mind-numbing detail the extraction of mineral ore, going as far as to provide a protocol for the preparation of sulphuric acid. The latter doesn’t sound that important until you realise that it is generally considered among the most important chemicals in the world, and is still used in the industrial production of hundreds of other chemicals. It’s important enough that the level of sulphuric acid production is considered a good indicator of a nation’s industrial strength (a statistic that is presumably mostly of use to fiendish men with bald heads who live in volcanoes and spend their time twiddling their tiny moustaches and cackling insanely).

Another man who would throw his pestle out of the pram (a rather vicious action, those things tend to be big and heavy) if he were forgotten is Wei Boyang, a much more ancient and Chinese alchemist than Paracelsus or Georgius. In fact, Boyang would not merely throw his pestle, but likely load it into a tube and fire it at your head (possibly with some pretty sparks), for it was he who first recorded the production of gunpowder. An accidental discovery in the search for immortality has proved, somewhat ironically, to be a staggering and bloody influence on Western and Eastern civilisations alike for some two thousand years.

No list of ancient-world proto-chemists would be complete without an Egyptian, and here comes one now (if you are picturing him walking in sideways, you are a racist). Alexander of Aphrodisias lived during the first century AD, but would be a hero to drinkers the world over if only they knew him. He developed and described the technique of distillation, that which underlies the production of whiskey (amongst other things that become totally unimportant once whiskey gets involved).

So, while no gold emerged from the mortars of the alchemists, they were far from failures. And once you have the ability to make things go ‘boom’… well, the gold just starts mysteriously appearing.

J.R.I. Coleman is a Masters student at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, although he was once the hamster President (and human Editor) of Weevil. He is slightly irked that Ancient Egyptians had better access to distilled water than he does in a multi-million pound lab.

I make far too many chicken and egg jokes; after all, I am a developmental biologist. However, I never stopped to wonder if something strange might be going on before the egg was even laid. Until, that is, I came across the late C. Louis Kervran’s work, and his claim that eggshells are formed by biological transmutation – which would make the humble chicken a cold fusion reactor.

Cold fusion was the wildest dream and the worst nightmare of nuclear physicists for years: ‘wildest dream’ because of its promise of a cheap, abundant and non-polluting energy source, and ‘worst nightmare’ because of the countless promising academic careers that went into meltdown during its pursuit.

To understand the cold fusion controversy and its relevance to poultry, we need to compare it to conventional hot fusion. Because all atomic nuclei are positively charged, bringing them close enough to fuse into a new element requires an enormous energy input to overcome their mutual repulsion. Whether in the sun’s core or in the laboratory, this means conditions of heat and pressure that are incompatible with any biological process. This is the main theoretical argument against cold fusion: if these reactions were to occur at room temperature, how could we possibly overcome that energy barrier? Even so, since fusion of lighter nuclei, such as hydrogen, also releases energy in the form of heat and photons (think sunlight), the possibility of harvesting this energy at room temperature was often just too tempting.

But back to Kervran. He observed that chickens deprived of dietary calcium laid eggs with soft, calcium-deficient shells. After potassium supplementation, the calcium content and hardness of their eggshells suddenly increased, despite the diet still being calcium-deficient. The difference between the extremely small mass of calcium the chickens consumed and the larger mass of calcium in the eggshells led him to conclude that nuclear fusion of potassium with hydrogen, under normal biological conditions, somehow generated the extra calcium.

Kervran was by all accounts a careful and well-respected scientist, but however meticulous his measurements, this conclusion ignores some basic nutritional biochemistry. First, calcium can be released from bone, which at face value is a more plausible biological source of calcium for eggshells. Second, potassium deficiency alone produces softer, thinner eggshells anyway, regardless of dietary calcium intake. This is because the tissue that lays down the shell needs potassium ions (together with sodium) to transport calcium to the right place, a process that relies on ion gradients and has nothing to do with nuclear reactions. Thus, Kervan’s soft-shell layers might well have mobilised calcium from their skeletons, but could only make use of it when given potassium supplements.

Add to this the abundance of methodological flaws – ranging from missing controls to mis-wired detectors and a general lack of reliable repeats – plaguing attempts to demonstrate cold fusion, and the transmutation theory of eggshells looks even less plausible. Of course, it’s possible that processes we can’t currently reproduce in a laboratory could still occur in nature. However, we should also remember that citing biological organisms’ apparent miraculous ability to carry out reactions that laboratories and industries cannot (or at least not efficiently) is not proof of biological transmutation either.

Though Kervran’s work on transmutation has remained on the outskirts of modern science, his unconventional take on eggshell formation was nonetheless awarded the 1993 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics. Since Ig Nobels are given for research that makes you laugh, then makes you think, this one was thoroughly well-deserved. However, I still can’t help thinking that nuclear fusion, unlike revenge, is probably best not served cold. Even inside a chicken.

A. J. Thompson will never view eggs sunny-side-up in the same way again.