He said, referring to the hard-boiling, ‘The ease with which the egg p otems are eat-_denatured indicates a partial denaturation to begin with and, cons1denng the nature of the shell, the obvious guilt would lie at the door of heavy-metal contamination.’
So a portion of the yolk was analyzed for inorganic constituents and it was f? nd to be high in chloraurate ion, which is a singly charg’ed ion contammg an atom of gold and four of chlorine, the symbol for which is AuCl4 – . (The ‘Au’ symbol for gold comes from the fact that the Latin word for gold is ‘aurum.’) When I say the chloraurate ion content was high,I mean it ‘‘.as 3.2 parts per thousand, or 0.32 per cent. That’s high enough to form msoluble complexes of ‘gold protein’ which would coagulate easily.
Finley sai?, ‘It’s obvious this egg cannot hatch. Nor can any other such egg. It is heavy-metal poisoned. Gold may be more glamorous than lead but 1t 1s Just as poisonous to proteins.’
I agreed loomily. ‘At least it’s safe from decay, too.’
Quite right. No self-respecting bug would live in this cholo- rauriferous soup.’
The final spectrographic analysis of the gold of the shell came in. Virtually pure. The only detectable impurity was iron which amounted to 0.23 per cent of the whole. The iron content of the egg yolk had been twice normal, also. At the moment, however, the matter of the iron was neglected.
One week fter Project Goose was begun, an expedition was sent into Texas. Five biochemists went – the accent was still on biochemistry, you see – along with three truckloads of equipment, and a squadron of army personnel. I went along too, of course.
As soon as we arrived, we cut MacGregor’s farm off from the world.
That was a lucky thing, you know – the security measures we took nght from the start. The reasoning was wrong, at first, but the results were good.
The Department wanted Project Goose kept quiet at the start simply because there was always the thought that this might still be an elaborate hoax and we couldn’t risk the bad publicity if it were. And if it weren’t a hoax, we couldn’t risk the newspaper hounding that would definitely result over any goose-and-golden-egg story.
It was only well after the start of Project Goose, well after our arrival at MacGregor’s farm, that the real implications of the matter became clear.
Naturally MacGregor didn’t like the men and equipment settling down all about him. He didn’t like being told The Goose was government property. He didn’t like having his eggs impounded.
He didn’t like it but he agreed to it – if you can call it agreeing when negotiations are being carried on while a machine gun is being assembled in a man’s barnyard and ten men, with bayonets fixed, are marching past while the arguing is going on.
He was compensated, of course. What’s money to the government?
The Goose didn’t like a few things, either – like having blood samples taken. We didn’t dare anesthetize it for fear of doing anything to alter its metabolism, and it took two men to hold it each time. Ever try to hold an angry goose?
The Goose was put under a twenty-four-hour guard with the threat of summary court-martial to any man who let anything happen to it. If any of those soldiers read this article, they may get a sudden glimmer of what was going on. If so, they will probably have the sense to keep shut about it. At least, if they know what’s good for them, they will.
The blood of The Goose was put through every test conceivable.
It carried 2 parts per hundred thousand (0.002 per cent) of chloraurate ion. Blood taken from the hepatic vein was richer than the rest, almost 4 parts per hundred thousand.
Finley grunted. ‘The liver,’ he said.
We took x rays. On the x-ray negative, the liver was a cloudy mass of light gray, lighter than the viscera in its neighborhood, because it stopped more of the x rays, because it contained more gold. The blood vessels showed up lighter than the liver proper and the ovaries were pure white. No x rays got through the ovaries at all.
It made sense, and in an early report Finley stated it as bluntly as possible. Paraphrasing the report, it went, in part:
‘The chloraurate ion is secreted by the liver into the blood stream. The ovaries act as a trap for the ion, which is there reduced to metallic gold and deposited as a shell about the developing egg. Relatively high concentrations of unreduced chloraurate ion penetrate the contents of the developing egg.
‘There is l!ttle _doubt that The Goose finds this process useful asa means of gettmg nd of the gold atoms which, if allowed to accumulate w uld u doubtedly poison it. Excretion by eggshell may be novel in th; ammal kingdom, even unique, but there is no denying that it is keeping The Goose alive.
‘Unfortunately, however, the ovary is being locally poisoned to such an e tent that few eggs are laid, probably not more than will suffice to get nd of the accumulating gold, and those few eggs are definitely unhatchable.’
That was all he said in writing, but to the rest of us, he said, ‘That leaves one peculiarly embarrassing question.’
I knew what it was. We all did.
Where was the gold coming from?
No answer to that for a while, except for some negative evidence. There wa no perceptible gold in_ Th ‘Goose’s feed, nor were there any gold-beanng pebbles about that 1t might have swallowed. There was no trace of gold anywhere in the soil of the area and a search of the house and grounds revealed nothing. There were no gold coins, gold jewelry, gold plate, gold watches, or gold anything. No one on the farm even had as much as gold fillings in his teeth.
There was Mrs MacGregor’s wedding ring, of course, but she had only had one in her life and she was wearing it.
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 Goosenother pr cedure to which the bird objected strenuously-with the idea of testmg the contents of its alimentary canal. It was one of our routme 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 bmldmg we had put up overnight – almost – near the goosepen.
Nevis said, ‘The Goose is low in bile pigment. Duodenal contents show about none.’
Finley frowned an said, ‘Liver function is probably knocked Ioop 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 detergentlike 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 substances that were 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 squarish 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 squarish 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.
