So where was the gold coming from?

  The beginnings of the answer came on August 16, 1955.

  Albert Nevis, of Purdue, was forcing gastric tubes into The Goose (another procedure to which the bird objected strenuously) with the idea of testing the contents of its alimentary canal. It was one of our routine searches for exogenous gold.

  Gold was found, but only in traces and there was every reason to suppose those traces had accompanied the digestive secretions and were therefore endogenous (from within, that is) in origin.

  However, something else showed up, or the lack of it, anyway.

  I was there when Nevis came into Finley’s office in the temporary building we had put up overnight (almost) near the goose pen.

  Nevis said, ‘The Goose is low in bile pigment. Duodenal contents show about none.’

  Finley frowned and said, ‘Liver function is probably knocked loop-the-loop because of its gold concentration. It probably isn’t secreting bile at all.’

  ‘It is secreting bile,’ said Nevis. ‘Bile acids are present in normal quantity. Near normal, anyway. It’s just the bile pigments that are missing. I did a fecal analysis and that was confirmed. No bile pigments.’

  Let me explain something at this point. Bile acids are steroids secreted by the liver into the bile and via that are poured into the upper end of the small intestine. These bile acids are detergent-like molecules which help to emulsify the fat in our diet (or The Goose’s) and distribute them in the form of tiny bubbles through the watery intestinal contents. This distribution, or homogenization, if you’d rather, makes it easier for the fat to be digested.

  Bile pigments, the substance that was missing in The Goose, are something entirely different. The liver makes them out of hemoglobin, the red oxygen-carrying protein of the blood. Worn-out hemoglobin is broken up in the liver, the heme part being split away. The heme is made up of a ring-like molecule (called a ‘porphyrin’) with an iron atom in the center. The liver takes the iron out and stores it for future use, then breaks the ring-like molecule that is left. This broken porphyrin is bile pigment. It is colored brownish or greenish (depending on further chemical changes) and is secreted into the bile.

  The bile pigments are of no use to the body. They are poured into the bile as waste products. They pass through the intestines and come out with the feces. In fact, the bile pigments are responsible for the color of the feces.

  Finley’s eyes begin to glitter.

  Nevis said, ‘It looks as though porphyrin catabolism isn’t following the proper course in the liver. Doesn’t it to you?’

  It surely did. To me, too.

  There was tremendous excitement after that. This was the first metabolic abnormality, not directly involving gold, that had been found in The Goose!

  We took a liver biopsy (which means we punched a cylindrical sliver out of The Goose reaching down into the liver). It hurt The Goose but didn’t harm it. We took more blood samples, too.

  This time, we isolated hemoglobin from the blood and small quantities of the cytochromes from our liver samples. (The cytochromes are oxidizing enzymes that also contain heme.) We separated out the heme and in acid solution some of it precipitated in the form of a brilliant orange substance. By August 22, 1955, we had 5 micrograms of the compound.

  The orange compound was similar to heme, but it was not heme. The iron in heme can be in the form of a doubly charged ferrous ion (Fe++) or a triply charged ferric ion (Fe+++), in which latter case, the compound is called hematin. (Ferrous and ferric, by the way, come from the Latin word for iron, which is ‘ferrum’.)

  The orange compound we had separated from heme had the porphyrin portion of the molecule all right, but the metal in the center was gold, to be specific, a triply charged auric ion (Au+++). We called this compound ‘aureme’, which is simply short for ‘auric heme’.

  Aureme was the first naturally-occurring gold-containing organic compound ever discovered. Ordinarily, it would rate headline news in the world of biochemistry. But now it was nothing; nothing at all in comparison to the further horizons its mere existence opened up.

  The liver, it seemed, was not breaking up the heme to bile pigment. Instead it was converting it to aureme; it was replacing iron with gold. The aureme, in equilibrium with chloraurate ion, entered the blood stream and was carried to the ovaries where the gold was separated out and the porphyrin portion of the molecule disposed of by some as yet unidentified mechanism.

  Further analyses showed that 29 per cent of the gold in the blood of The Goose was carried in the plasma in the form of chloraurate ion. The remaining 71 per cent was carried in the red blood corpuscles in the form of ‘auremoglobin’. An attempt was made to feed The Goose traces of radioactive gold so that we could pick up radioactivity in plasma and corpuscles and see how readily the auremoglobin molecules were handled in the ovaries. It seemed to us the auremoglobin should be much more slowly disposed of than the dissolved chloraurate ion in the plasma.

  The experiment failed, however, since we detected no radioactivity. We put it down to inexperience since none of us were isotopes men and that was too bad since the failure was highly significant, really, and by not realizing it, we lost several days.

  The auremoglobin was, of course, useless as far as carrying oxygen was concerned, but it only made up about 0.1 per cent of the total hemoglobin of the red blood cells so there was no interference with the respiration of The Goose.

  This still left us with the question of where the gold came from and it was Nevis who first made the crucial suggestion.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, at a meeting of the group held on the evening of August 25, 1955, ‘Maybe The Goose doesn’t replace the iron with gold. Maybe it changes the iron to gold.’

  Before I met Nevis personally that summer, I had known him through his publications (his field is bile chemistry and liver function) and had always considered him a cautious, clear-thinking person. Almost over-cautious. One wouldn’t consider him capable for a minute of making any such completely ridiculous statement.

  It just shows the desperation and demoralization involved in Project Goose.

  The desperation was the fact that there was nowhere, literally nowhere, that the gold could come from. The Goose was excreting gold at the rate of 38.9 grams of gold a day and had been doing it over a period of months. That gold had to come from somewhere and, failing that—absolutely failing that—it had to be made from something.

  The demoralization that led us to consider the second alternative was due to the mere fact that we were face to face with The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs; the undeniable GOOSE. With that, everything became possible. All of us were living in a fairy-tale world and all of us reacted to it by losing all sense of reality.

  Finley considered the possibility seriously. ‘Hemoglobin,’ he said, ‘enters the liver and a bit of auremoglobin comes out. The gold shell of the eggs has iron as its only impurity. The egg yolk is high in only two things; in gold, of course, and also, somewhat, in iron. It all makes a horrible kind of distorted sense. We’re going to need help, men.’

  We did and it meant a third stage of the investigation. The first stage had consisted of myself alone. The second was the biochemical task-force. The third, the greatest, the most important of all, involved the invasion of the nuclear physicists.

  On September 5, 1955, John L. Billings of the University of California arrived. He had some equipment with him and more arrived in the following weeks. More temporary structures were going up. I could see that within a year we would have a whole research institution built about The Goose.

  Billings joined our conference the evening of the 5th.

  Finley brought him up to date, and said, ‘There are a great many serious problems involved in this iron-to-gold idea. For one thing, the total quantity of iron in The Goose can only be of the order of half a gram, yet nearly 40 grams of gold a day are being manufactured.’

  Billings had a clear, high-pitched voice. He said, ‘There’s a worse problem than that. Iron is about at the bottom of the packing fraction curve. Gold is much higher up. To convert a gram of iron to a gram of gold takes just about as much energy as is produced by the fissioning of one gram of U-235.’

  Finley shrugged. ‘I’ll leave the problem to you.’

  Billings said, ‘Let me think about it.’

  He did more than think. One of the things done was to isolate fresh samples of heme from The Goose, ash it and send the iron oxide to Brookhaven for isotopic analysis. There was no particular reason to do that particular thing. It was just one of a number of individual investigations, but it was the one that brought results.

  When the figures came back, Billings choked on them. He said, ‘There’s no Fe56.’

  ‘What about the other isotopes?’ asked Finley at once.

  ‘All present,’ said Billings, ‘in the appropriate relative ratios, but no detectable Fe56.’

  I’ll have to explain again. Iron, as it occurs naturally, is made up of four different isotopes. These isotopes are varieties of atoms that differ from one another in atomic weight. Iron atoms with an atomic weight of 56, or Fe56, make up to 91.6 per cent of all atoms in iron. The other atoms have atomic weights of 54, 57 and 58.

  The iron from the heme of The Goose was made up only of Fe54, Fe57 and Fe58. The implication was obvious. Fe56 was disappearing while the other isotopes weren’t and this meant a nuclear reaction was taking place. A nuclear reaction could take one isotope and leave others be. An ordinary chemical reaction, any chemical reaction at all, would have to dispose of all isotopes equally.

  ‘But it’s energically impossible,’ said Finley.

  He was only saying that in mild sarcasm with Billings’ initial remark in mind. As biochemists, we knew well enough that many reactions went on in the body which required an input of energy and that this was taken care of by coupling the energy-demanding reaction with an energy-producing reaction.

  However, chemical reactions gave off or took up a few kilocalories per mole. Nuclear reactions gave off or took up millions. To supply energy for an energy-demanding nuclear reaction required, therefore, a second and energy-producing nuclear reaction.

  We didn’t see Billings for two days.

  When he did come back, it was to say, ‘See here, The energy-producing reaction must produce just as much energy per nucleon involved as the energy-demanding reaction uses up. If it produces even slightly less, then the overall reaction won’t go. If it produces even slightly more, then considering the astronomical number of nucleons involved, the excess energy produced would vaporize The Goose in a fraction of a second.’

  ‘So?’ said Finley.

  ‘So the number of reactions possible is very limited. I have been able to find only one plausible system. Oxygen-18, if converted to iron-56, will produce enough energy to drive the iron-56 on to gold-197. It’s like going down one side of a roller-coaster and then up the other. We’ll have to test this.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘First, suppose we check the isotopic composition of the oxygen in The Goose.’

  Oxygen is made up of three stable isotopes, almost all of it O16. O18 makes up only one oxygen atom out of 250.

  Another blood sample. The water content was distilled off in vacuum and some of it put through a mass spectrograph. There was O18 there but only one oxygen atom out of 1300. Fully 80 per cent of the O18 we expected wasn’t there.

  Billings said, ‘That’s corroborative evidence. Oxygen-18 is being used up. It is being supplied constantly in the food and water fed to The Goose, but it is still being used up. Gold-197 is being produced. Iron-56 is one intermediate and since the reaction that uses up iron-56 is faster than the one that produces it, it has no chance to reach significant concentration and isotopic analysis shows its absence.

  We weren’t satisfied, so we tried again. We kept The Goose for a week on water that had been enriched with O18. Gold production went up almost at once. At the end of a week, it was producing 45.8 grams while the O18 content of its body water was no higher than before.

  ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ said Billings.

  He snapped his pencil and stood up. ‘That Goose is a living nuclear reactor.’

  The Goose was obviously a mutation.

  A mutation suggested radiation among other things and radiation brought up the thought of nuclear tests conducted in 1952 and 1953 several hundred miles away from the site of MacGregor’s farm. (If it occurs to you that no nuclear tests have been conducted in Texas, it just shows two things; I’m not telling you everything and you don’t know everything.)

  I doubt that at any time in the history of the atomic era was background radiation so thoroughly analyzed and the radioactive content of the soil so rigidly sifted.

  Back records were studied. It didn’t matter how top-secret they were. By this time, Project Goose had the highest priority that had ever existed.

  Even weather records were checked in order to follow the behavior of the winds at the time of the nuclear tests.

  Two things turned up.

  One: The background radiation at the farm was a bit higher than normal. Nothing that could possibly do harm, I hasten to add. There were indications, however, that at the time of the birth of The Goose, the farm had been subjected to the drifting edge of at least two fallouts. Nothing really harmful, I again hasten to add.

  Second: The Goose, alone of all geese on the farm; in fact, alone of all living creatures on the farm that could be tested, including the humans, showed no radioactivity at all. Look at it this way: everything shows traces of radioactivity; that’s what is meant by background radiation. But The Goose showed none.

  Finley sent one report on December 6, 1955, which I can paraphrase as follows:

  ‘The Goose is a most extraordinary mutation, born of a high-level radioactivity environment which at once encouraged mutations in general and which made this particular mutation a beneficial one.

  ‘The Goose has enzyme systems capable of catalyzing various nuclear reactions. Whether the enzyme system consists of one enzyme or more than one is not known. Nor is anything known of the nature of the enzymes in question. Nor can any theory be yet advanced as to how an enzyme can catalyze a nuclear reaction, since these involve particulate interactions with forces five orders of magnitude higher than those involved in the ordinary chemical reactions commonly catalyzed by enzymes.

  ‘The overall nuclear change is from oxygen-18 to gold-197. The oxygen-18 is plentiful in its environment, being present in significant amount in water and all organic foodstuffs. The gold-197 is excreted via the ovaries. One known intermediate is iron-56 and the fact that auremoglobin is formed in the process leads us to suspect that the enzyme or enzymes involved may have heme as a prosthetic group.

  ‘There has been considerable thought devoted to the value this overall nuclear change might have to the goose. The oxygen-18 does it no harm and the gold-197 is troublesome to be rid of, potentially poisonous, and a cause of its sterility. Its formation might possibly be a means of avoiding greater danger. This danger——’

  But just reading it in the report, friend, makes it all seem so quiet, almost pensive. Actually, I never saw a man come closer to apoplexy and survive than Billings did when he found out about our own radioactive gold experiments which I told you about earlier—the ones in which we detected no radioactivity in the goose, so that we discarded the results as meaningless.

  Many times over he asked how we could possibly consider it unimportant that we had lost radioactivity.

  ‘You’re like the cub reporter,’ he said, ‘who was sent to cover a society wedding and returning saying there was no story because the groom hadn’t shown up.

  ‘You fed The Goose radioactive gold and lost it. Not only that you failed to detect any natural radioactivity about The Goose. Any carbon-14. Any potassium-40. And you called it failure.’

  We started feeding The Goose radioactive isotopes. Cautiously, at first, but before the end of January of 1956 we were shovelling it in.

  The Goose remained non-radioactive.

  ‘What it amounts to,’ said Billings, ‘is that this enzyme-catalyzed nuclear process of The Goose manages to convert any unstable isotope into a stable isotope.’

  ‘Useful,’ I said.

  ‘Useful? It’s a thing of beauty. It’s the perfect defense against the atomic age. Listen, the conversion of oxygen-18 to gold-197 should liberate eight and a fraction positrons per oxygen atom. That means eight and a fraction gamma rays as soon as each positron combines with an electron. No gamma rays either. The Goose must be able to absorb gamma rays harmlessly.’

  We irradiated The Goose with gamma rays. As the level rose, The Goose developed a slight fever and we quit in panic. It was just fever, though, not radiation sickness. A day passed, the fever subsided, and The Goose was as good as new.

  ‘Do you see what we’ve got?’ demanded Billings.

  ‘A scientific marvel,’ said Finley.

  ‘Good Lord, don’t you see the practical applications? If we could find out the mechanism and duplicate it in the test-tube, we’ve got a perfect method of radioactive ash disposal. The most important gimmick preventing us from going ahead with a full-scale atomic economy is the thought of what to do with the radioactive isotopes manufactured in the process. Sift them through an enzyme preparation in large vats and that would be it.

  ‘Find out the mechanism, gentlemen, and you can stop worrying about fallouts. We would find a protection against radiation sickness.

  ‘Alter the mechanism somehow and we can have Geese excreting any element needed. How about uranium-235 eggshells?

  ‘The mechanism! The mechanism!’

  He could shout ‘Mechanism’ all he wanted. It did no good.

  We sat there, all of us, staring at The Goose and sitting on our hands.

  If only the eggs would hatch. If only we could get a tribe of nuclear-reactor Geese.