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.
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 double charged ferrous ion (Fe++) or a triply charged ferric ion (Fe+++), in which latter case, the compound is called he-matin. (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 'auremo-globin.' 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 auremo-globin 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,