James Price, Fellow of the Royal Society, did a public experiment in which he appeared to change sulfur into 50 times its weight in gold. The Society took the claim seriously enough that they called him before the other Fellows to rerun the experiment. When Price failed, historian Richard Gregory tells us, he drank poison on the spot and died. Price hands us a disturbing parable about science and credulity. Hoping to change lower substances into gold is not silly.
Transmutation clearly is possible.
Whenever we drive our cars, we transmute the hydrocarbons that make up gasoline into water, carbon dioxide, and worse. Nuclear fusion literally transmutes hydrogen into helium at the atomic level. A century before Price, Robert Boyle wrote a paper claiming he'd generated heat by mixing a special form of mercury with gold. The paper was vague. We don't know what his special mercury was.