I’m mystified and somewhat bemused as to why this is suddenly news – must have been a slow day at the farm. I knew about gold and other precious metals being found in trace amounts in plant matter 20 years ago, when I was studying for my geology degree (before I became a elec engineer).

The field is called biogeochemistry, and a related field is called geobotany. A lot of the work was done in Australia and elsewhere in the 60’s and 70’s. However using these methods for prospecting was eventually dropped because you needed specially skilled field personnel to take samples and record data, basically a qualified botanist or biogeochemist, which was expensive. Also, there weren’t enough of these skilled people to go around.

As for reporting this “find” in ‘Nature’, I’m a bit taken aback that it got through the peer-review process, as there are textbooks written on the subject, e.g. Bashkin, 2002, Modern Biogeochemistry. Kluwer. Maybe the ‘Nature’ editorial review board has fallen asleep at the switch?

The field of biogeochemistry is even older and stems from Ukrainian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky’s work of 1926, The Biosphere.