I hope you mean the metaphoric alchemy of advancing the soul; changing lead into gold, as the stereotype goes for the term "alchemy", is all but magickal in nature, not so much chemical.On a site note, if we follow the anime/manga Full Metal Alchemist, the law of conservation of matter would apply, anyways; lead would lose size/density when it became gold, but, I think there's some more "common materials" that are higher on the periodic table that would be more efficient..or carbon. Tons of carbon.
As for transmutation and alchemy, yeah, mostly lost arts or we would ALL be doing it.
