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 began 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, which was too bad since the failure was highly significant, really, and by not realizing it we lost several weeks.
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, ‘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 overcautious. 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 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 fifth.
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 on the order of half a gram, yet nearly forty 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 ave to xplain again: I on, 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 91.6 per cent of all the 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 Imphcation was obvious. Fe56 was disappearing while the other isotopes weren ‘It and this meant a nuclear reaction was taking pla e. A nuclear reaction could take one isotope and leave others be. An ordmary chemical reaction, any chemical reaction at all would have to dispose of all isotopes just about equally. ‘
‘But it’s energically impossible,’ said Finley.
He was o?ly sayi?g that in mild sarcasm with Billings’ initial remark in mi d. As biochemists, we knew well enough that many reactions went onm the body which required an input of energy and that this was taken car of by c upling the energy-demanding reaction with an energy-producmg 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 ?e did come back, it was to say, ‘See here. The energy-producmg 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 ver ll reaction won’t go. If it produces even slightly more: then considenng the astronomical number of nucleons involved, the excess energy produced would vaporize The Goose in a fraction ofa second.’
‘So?’ said Finley.
