Growing Your Own Gold

An anonymous reader submits: "Scientists believe it may be possible to grow gold like growing potatoes. Time to throw away my IT degree and go back to being a primary producer!"

Comments

Unspoken

[cgenman]

SMH.com.au has a more informed description of what happens. The gold is not "grown," it is "collected." Bacteria break down and carry gold material away from a larger vein, and another group picks it up and deposits it when they get to a chunk or nugget. ABC au also has a good article.

So unless you happen to live near a large, undiscovered underground tract of gold, your chance of growing gold in your backyard like potatoes is just about zero.

Re:Only Gold?

[Mangal]

Other kinds of bacteria can- they've been used to collect copper from poor quality ore. One big hurdle, of course, is the efficiency/speed of bioremediation (bioengineers are working on that one, you can be sure). Another problem is how to get the bacteria in contact with the metals; water could be pumped through a filtration system (bacterial filters), but you can't pump soil. Directly applying the bacteria to the soil would require removing the bacteria and all sequestered metals after the fact- not sure how to do this effectively, either. Leaving the metals behind would defeat the purpose. The bioengineers will have to construct bacteria that work significantly faster, I think, to make soil remediation via bacterial activity feasible.