For centuries, alchemists tried to turn cheap metal into gold and failed. Now a small company in San Francisco says it has done it. The claim has also set off a modern worry: could lab-made gold do to bullion what lab-grown diamonds did to the diamond trade?
What Marathon Fusion Announced
Marathon Fusion, a small fusion energy company in San Francisco, said it had converted mercury into stable gold last month, beating a record set by CERN tenfold. CERN is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, which runs the world’s largest particle physics lab near Geneva. The company shared the news on the social media platform X on October 21.
The announcement came with a big gap. Marathon has not said how much gold the experiment produced, and it has not shared full experimental data. The claim has not been independently verified.
How Fusion Turns Mercury Into Gold
The science is real, even if the scale is tiny. Fast neutrons from deuterium-tritium fusion reactions knock a neutron out of mercury-198, a common stable form of mercury. That creates radioactive mercury-197, which then decays into stable gold-197.
Marathon shared gamma-ray readings showing the signatures of both mercury-197 and gold-197 after the test. The company also says the same approach made copper isotopes used in cancer imaging and treatment.
How Does This Compare to CERN?
CERN has made gold before, but only in tiny amounts. Its ALICE experiment produced about 29 picograms of gold over four years of running the Large Hadron Collider. A picogram is a trillionth of a gram. Beating that by ten times is a scientific milestone, but it is still nowhere near enough gold to see, let alone sell.
Who Is Backing the Startup
The company has serious investors. Its backers include Breakthrough Energy, the climate technology network founded by Bill Gates, and Anglo American, the mining group that owns De Beers. That second name is worth noticing, since De Beers is the company most hurt by lab-grown diamonds.
Why Gold Prices Will Not Crash Anytime Soon
Marathon’s own numbers show how far away commercial gold is.
- Scale: Its 2025 research paper modelled roughly 2 tonnes of gold per gigawatt of thermal power each year. That assumes power plants far bigger than anything the company runs today.
- Current reactor size: The company’s current reactor is rated at about 1 kilowatt of fusion power, a millionth of a gigawatt.
- Radioactivity: Freshly made gold would carry some radioactive isotopes, and depending on the safety standard, it could need 7 to 17 years of storage before sale.
- No commercial fusion plant exists: The 2025 estimates came from a computer model, and that model has not been checked against a real commercial fusion reactor, because none exists yet.
For comparison, miners dig up roughly 3,000 tonnes of gold a year, and the total gold ever mined is around 200,000 tonnes. Even many fusion plants making 2 tonnes each would add only a small slice to that supply, and only after fusion power becomes a working industry.
Why Gold Is Not the Same as Diamonds
Lab-grown diamonds crashed prices because they are chemically the same stone, cheap to make, and mainly sold for jewellery. Gold works differently. Central banks hold it as a reserve, investors buy it as protection against inflation, and its value rests partly on trust that supply is limited. A technology that adds a small amount of new supply, years from now, is unlikely to break that trust overnight.
Still, the idea has rattled some people. Multicoin’s Tushar Jain asked publicly what lab-grown gold would do to gold prices. The timing is interesting too, because gold had already been trading about 5.56% lower in 2026. That slide began before Marathon’s post, so the news did not cause it.
What Happens Next
Three things will decide whether this is a headline or a turning point:
- Independent scientists confirming Marathon’s results
- The company publishing how much gold it made and at what cost
- Fusion power moving from lab experiments to real power plants
Until then, lab-grown gold is a fascinating science story, not a market threat. Gold investors can watch the story, but they do not need to panic.
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