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 of 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 worseproblem than that, iron is about at the 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 Fe58.'
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, makes 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, Fe67, and Fe58. The implication was obvious. Fe58 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 just about 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 kilo-calories 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