...You know, most people assume lead for some reason; I've always tried to argue that coal would be a far more reasonable material to use, and I've never heard someone come to that conclusion for themselves.

But no, we don't do that - we could, of course, but it would just be a waste of a talent. Creating gold isn't good for anything but upsetting the economy, anyway, especially since the country I came from does a fair amount of coal mining.

Again, though, there's nothing physically stopping us. Alchemy is a far broader discipline than that - it's more or less just transmuting one thing into another.