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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Copper, silver, and gold are also toxic in high doses but not in the same extreme way as lead, which should be kept as close to zero as possible.

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Yes, empirically, I guess at least gold cannot be too or immediately toxic, since thin gold leaf is sometimes put on sweets as a decoration in India - usually on peda kind of sweets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vark

Silver too, according to the above page.

If I recall correctly, gold is extremely unreactive as far as metals go -- I'd imagine that it may just be more-or-less biochemically neutral.

Edit: I may be dead wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organogold_chemistry

I think you're correct. Pure gold is extremely hard to dissolve or oxidize. There's three common methods, using a mercury amalgam(which is an alloying, so the gold is still unreacted), cyanide, or a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acid called aqua regia.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Toxicity, the gold ion is toxic, but there are no chemical processes known to occur in the human body that can solubilize metallic gold.

> Yes, empirically, I guess at least gold cannot be too or immediately toxic

Gold goes out from the body unchanged from how it went in.

An attribute capitalized upon by this product http://incrediblethings.com/food/this-gold-pill-makes-you-po...

Gold... toxic?

there was even an episode of house where the cause was gold poisoning.

I'm pretty sure it was silver, not gold.

It gives a person a "gray/purple" skin color that makes them look dead. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyria

That doesn't necessarily mean that the element is poisonous per se. Many good/healthy substances are poisonous at high levels,e.g.: Vitamin A poisoning [0] Water poisoning [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis_A [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication

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