How much gold is present in the human body?

There are many elements of which the human body is composed. One of those elements is Gold which is found in trace amounts in human body. According the technical treatise, The Elements Third Edition, written by John Emsley and published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford in 1998, the average human's body weighing 70 kilograms would composed of a total mass of 0.2 milligrams of gold. On an average there is about 0.000021 pounds of gold present in a person. The volume of this purified form gold is nearly to 10 nanoliters. If this refined gold were formed into a solid cube of purified gold, the measurement of each side of the cube would be 0.22 millimeters. By comparison, a person's body contains 43 kilograms of oxygen which is the most abundant element in the earth, as well as in the human body. Other elements found in the human body are 16 kilograms of carbon and 7 kilograms of hydrogen. The role of gold in the physiological processes of the human body was unknown for many years. But recently, it has been determined that gold

• plays a role in both the health and maintenance of the joints, as well as
• being a key element in the transmittal of electrical signals throughout the body.

One interesting note is that human body contains 1.0 gram of Silicon. This element is commonly found in the presence of gold in nature and its metabolic function is currently unknown.

• Ahnlide et al. (Malmo University Hospital, Sweden) found the concentration of gold in blood to be <0.04-0.15 ?g/L using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry for those without dental gold. For those with dental gold the concentration ranged from 0.04-1.07 ?g/L. The detection limit was 0.04 ?g/L.
• The average human adult has approximately 5 liters of blood. One might, however, expect gold to be taken up into tissues such as the liver. Indeed, in 1962, Parr and Taylor, demonstrating the determination of gold in biological materials via thermal neutron activation analysis, showed the gold concentration in human liver to range between 13 and 790 ?g?/g wet tissue, with a median value of 57 ??g/g and a mean of 114 ??g [3]. The CRC Handbook of Toxicology places the mass of the human liver at 2.3 g/100 g body weight. So, a lot more gold hangs around in blood then in the liver. Actually, in the 50s it was quite popular to subscribe to the alchemical properties of gold. In this case, the subjects (22 males and 10 females), ages ranging from a few hours after birth to 80 years, had never been treated with drugs containing gold. The liver samples were taken post-mortem. Those interested in the toxicology of gold should do a search on "gold" at Amazon.com onPatty's Toxicology, Tox Issues Related to Metals/Neurotoxicology and Radiation/Metals and Metal Compounds [5].

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