Newton Never Managed It, but a San Francisco Startup Says It Has Made Gold

Leave a CommentNewton Never Managed It, but a San Francisco Startup Says It Has Made GoldInnovation, Technology

For as long as people have prized gold, some of them have tried to make it out of something cheaper. A small company in San Francisco now says it has done the job, and it needed no philosopher’s stone, only a fusion machine and a supply of mercury.

Marathon Fusion, founded in 2023, announced on Oct. 21 that it had turned mercury into “real, stable gold” at 10 times the rate of a record set at Europe’s CERN physics laboratory, Gadget Review reported. The company has not said how much gold it made, and no outside laboratory has checked the result yet.

A long line of hopefuls

The alchemists of the 16th and 17th centuries spent whole careers hunting for the philosopher’s stone, a substance they believed could turn lead into gold. They never had a chance, Scientific American explains, because they did not know that lead and gold are separate elements. They treated metals as mixtures that could be cooked into something finer. Their furnaces and flasks did help give birth to modern chemistry and medicine.

The most famous of them was Isaac Newton. “The scholarly estimate is that Newton, during his lifetime, wrote over 1 million words on alchemy,” historian James Voelkel told the Christian Science Monitor in 2016, when the Chemical Heritage Foundation bought a page in Newton’s hand describing “sophic mercury,” an ingredient thought necessary for making the stone. There is no evidence he ever made it.

The physicists get there first

The 20th century finally managed the trick, at a steep price. In 1980, Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues used a particle accelerator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to turn bismuth into trace amounts of gold. Beam time cost about $5,000 an hour. Seaborg figured it “would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment,” at a time when gold sold for about $560 an ounce.

In May 2025, CERN reported that its Large Hadron Collider had been making gold without trying. When lead nuclei race past each other in near misses, the electric fields between them can knock three protons out of a lead nucleus, and what is left is gold. Over four years the collider made about 86 billion gold nuclei, roughly 29 trillionths of a gram, and each one broke apart a fraction of a second later.

Mercury’s turn

Marathon takes a different road. When two heavy forms of hydrogen fuse, the reaction throws off a very fast neutron. If that neutron strikes an atom of mercury-198, it knocks a second neutron loose and leaves mercury-197 behind. Over the next few days the mercury-197 turns into gold-197, the only stable form of gold, so this gold stays put.

The company’s own scientists are the first to say gold is not their main prize. In a February paper, they put a price on a single fusion neutron. Used to make gold, a neutron is worth about the same as when it is used to make electricity, roughly $2.6 × 10⁻²⁰. Used to make actinium-225, a scarce isotope now being tested against cancer, it is worth about 3 billion times as much.

So Marathon is starting with medicine. It says it has already made copper-64 and copper-67, which are used to image and treat cancer, by aiming the same neutrons at zinc. Another Marathon paper estimates that a fusion source running at a few megawatts could meet world demand for most major medical isotopes.

The bottom line

The old alchemists were after riches. Their modern successors may deliver something more useful: a steady supply of cancer medicine made in a machine in San Francisco, with gold coming later, once fusion plants grow large enough to make it pay. Newton and the alchemists never got their gold. Marathon still has to show the world its numbers, but it has already gone further than he did.

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