# Mercury into gold: US start-up Marathon Fusion claims it beat CERN tenfold; what it means for gold prices Source: Searchable (https://searchable.pk/news/science/mercury-into-gold-us-start-up-marathon-fusion-claims-it-beat-cern-tenfold-what) Type: News article Author: Searchable Editorial Published: 24 Oct 2026 Updated: 24 Oct 2026 Retrieved: 25 Oct 2026 > The San Francisco fusion company says it turned mercury into stable gold with neutrons from fusion reactions. The claim is unverified, and the amounts are tiny. **Can you turn mercury into gold?** A small San Francisco company, **Marathon Fusion**, says it has done exactly that: it announced on Wednesday that last month it transmuted mercury into **stable gold, beating a record set by CERN by a factor of ten**, [Euronews reported](https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/23/could-lab-made-gold-crash-prices-like-diamonds-us-start-up-says-it-turned-mercury-into-gol). The search "marathon fusion gold" has started trending in Pakistan, where gold is the most watched price after petrol. The claim **has not been independently verified**, and the company has not said how much gold it made or what it cost. ## How it works Marathon develops fuel systems for future fusion power plants. Its method fires **neutrons from fusion reactions at mercury**. That turns some mercury into an unstable isotope which then decays into gold, the element next to mercury on the periodic table. It is real physics, not alchemy, but it happens one atom at a time. For scale: in 2025 CERN said its Large Hadron Collider had produced about **29 picograms** of gold (29 trillionths of a gram) during 2015 to 2018, and those nuclei were destroyed almost instantly in collisions. Ten times a few dozen picograms is still far too small to see. ## Who is behind it Marathon was founded in 2023 by **Kyle Schiller** and **Adam Rutkowski**, a former SpaceX engineer. It lists the US Department of Energy as a partner, won a 2023 award from ARPA-E, the department's high-risk energy research agency, and is backed by Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy network and by Anglo American, the mining group that owns De Beers. It also says it has broken a 40-year-old Soviet record with a plasma centrifuge and is building a reactor in San Francisco. ## Could it crash gold prices like lab-grown diamonds? That is the fear Euronews raised. Lab-grown diamonds are chemically identical to mined stones, and wholesale prices for them fell 90% to 95% from 2015 levels as factories churned them out. Gold is different for now: there is no sign anyone can make it from mercury in useful amounts, or more cheaply than digging it up. ## What it means in Pakistan Nothing changes at the sarafa today. **24-carat gold is Rs 414,920 a tola** on our [gold price page](/data/gold-24k-tola) (reading of 24 October 2026), and the price here follows the world price and the dollar rate. If you are buying or selling, convert tola, grams and ounces with the [gold converter](/tools/finance/gold-converter) before you visit a jeweller. ## Frequently asked questions **Can mercury really be turned into gold?** In physics, yes: firing neutrons at mercury can make an unstable isotope that decays into gold. Marathon Fusion says it has done this at ten times CERN's record, but its claim has not been independently verified and the quantities involved are microscopic. **Will lab-made gold lower gold prices in Pakistan?** Not now. No one has shown gold can be made this way in useful amounts or at a cost below mining. The gold price in Pakistan follows the world price and the rupee. ## Sources - Could lab-made gold crash prices like diamonds? US start-up says it turned mercury into gold (Euronews): https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/23/could-lab-made-gold-crash-prices-like-diamonds-us-start-up-says-it-turned-mercury-into-gol How to cite: "Mercury into gold: US start-up Marathon Fusion claims it beat CERN tenfold; what it means for gold prices", Searchable, 24 Oct 2026, https://searchable.pk/news/science/mercury-into-gold-us-start-up-marathon-fusion-claims-it-beat-cern-tenfold-what