So a bit of background. in the spiritual practice of alchemy, the philosopher's stone was a mythical element that when added to lead, would transmute it into gold, but would also transmute the alchemist into a supposedly perfect being.

I've long used this to make a philosophical point, because as we know today, gold is actually less dense than lead by atomic weight, so I would argue, sometimes it's not what we add, but what we remove that makes the difference.

Today, however, I went on a wild hair, wondering what if we took this advice literally, what might come up?

So I started by subtracting the atomic weight of gold from the atomic weight of lead, and searched for that, landing initially at beryllium, but beryllium is barely present in most people's bodys, so I went for a different angle and tried to see what elements in the human body have a total atomic weight of 9, and what came up was florine.

If you've ever come across arguments about fluoridation of drinking water, you're probably at least passingly familiar with sodium floride and it's use in drinking water. I could speculate further, but honestly, I want to see where this conversation heads.

So a bit of background. in the spiritual practice of alchemy, the philosopher's stone was a mythical element that when added to lead, would transmute it into gold, but would also transmute the alchemist into a supposedly perfect being.

I've long used this to make a philosophical point, because as we know today, lead is actually less dense than lead by atomic weight, so I would argue, sometimes it's not what we add, but what we remove that makes the difference.

Today, however, I went on a wild hair, wondering what if we took this advice literally, what might come up?

So I started by subtracting the atomic weight of gold from the atomic weight of lead, and searched for that, landing initially at beryllium, but beryllium is barely present in most people's bodys, so I went for a different angle and tried to see what elements in the human body have a total atomic weight of 9, and what came up was florine.

If you've ever come across arguments about fluoridation of drinking water, you're probably at least passingly familiar with sodium floride and it's use in drinking water. I could speculate further, but honestly, I want to see where this conversation heads.