Could scientists turning lead into gold ruin the price of the yellow metal?

Scientists' successful conversion of lead into gold has validated medieval alchemists, but the outcome won't cause the price of gold to plummet anytime soon

There are a number of reasons why gold has always been valuable economically.

It doesn't deteriorate or cause skin irritation if worn as jewelry because it is inert. Because of its relative softness, it can be readily formed into interchangeable small units.

However, the rarity of gold is the attribute that has lured investors throughout history.

The world's gold reserves are limited. If all of that were compressed into a single cube, it would be about 22 meters long on each side, according to the World Gold Council's estimation that about 216,265 tonnes have been mined throughout human history.

Of course, there is a limited amount of gold that can be extracted from the earth. Is it, though?

Researchers at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), known as ALICE (A Large Ion Converter Experiment), released a study earlier in May that measured the transformation of lead atoms into gold.

"Trillions of times less than would be required to make a piece of jewellery" is the nearly unthinkable amount of gold that was producedjust 29 picograms. They also only lasted a few nanoseconds before breaking up into the subatomic particles that made them up.

Essentially, however, the ALICE team has succeeded in converting base metals, especially lead, into gold, which was the stated objective of medieval alchemists.

A senior portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman named Hakan Kaya tells BFIA, "At the current stage, it's very economically unappealing, and not scaleable." Ultimately, though, many things that were once thought to be uneconomical have turned out to be so over time, particularly when it comes to commodities.

How would the price of gold change if lead were turned into gold?

The LHC is an incredibly costly piece of apparatus. Building it took ten years and cost £475 billion, and conducting experiments there costs about £55 billion a year.

It has produced less than a trillionth of a gold ring in less than a second.

Therefore, even though the discovery is striking, it won't be enough to upend the gold investment argument on its own. There are very few chances that it will be scalable to any meaningful extent, and if it were, it would probably take decades to advance the technology to a point where it is suitable.

But let's say for a second that this technology could be scaled up to turn lead straight into gold.

Gold prices would be impacted "in that hypothetical, low-probability state of the world," according to Kaya. "Gold would probably be more plentiful, and its limited value would be somewhat destroyed.

"This is like diamonds," he says. The availability of artificial diamonds caused a dent in the price of diamonds.

However, they didn't eradicate them entirely, and Kaya notes that "real" diamonds still command a premium outside of industrial use cases, where synthetic diamonds are frequently more effective than natural ones. This could be the case if gold were ever produced on a large scale.

Because ALICE's gold was an isotope of gold, its chemical makeup differed slightly from that of naturally occurring gold. Its chemical characteristics might not be impacted, but it would set it apart from natural gold and allow for a premium on naturally occurring gold.

Even in that type of setting, Kaya says, "I would still think gold would continue to function as a store of value."

Alchemy and gold that can be bought.

Numerous intriguing implications can be drawn from the thought experiment. "Real" gold might turn into a collector's item, according to Kaya.

The value of the original Mona Lisa painting is not diminished by the fact that there are countless copies of it in existence. "That is not replicable," he states.

Similar to this, if gold were ever mass-produced from lead, then perhaps lead-based products from earlier times, like gold bullion or particularly valuable gold coins, could become even more lustrous and stand out as artifacts from a bygone era.

According to Kaya, "it might even raise the value that people ascribe to real, authentic gold."

To make any of this more than speculation, enormous technological advancements would be required. At least over the long run, Kaya thinks that those who are less risk averse would undoubtedly be interested in funding that research.

However, there might be more practical and affordable ways to boost the supply of gold right now.

"Maybe you just go out and explore mining gold from asteroids if you're a gold miner," he responds. "At this point, it's probably more affordable and closer.