It's already possible to create gold at an atomic level in a lab. From Wikipedia (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_ ... ous_metals):
Gold synthesis in a nuclear reactor
Gold was synthesized from mercury by neutron bombardment in 1941, but the isotopes of gold produced were all radioactive.[12] In 1924, a Japanese physicist, Hantaro Nagaoka, accomplished the same feat.[13]
Gold can currently be manufactured in a nuclear reactor by irradiation either of platinum or mercury.
Only the mercury isotope 196Hg, which occurs with a frequency of 0.15% in natural mercury, can be converted to gold by slow neutron capture, and following electron capture, decay into gold's only stable isotope, 197Au. When other mercury isotopes are irradiated with slow neutrons, they also undergo neutron capture, but either convert into each other or beta decay into the thallium isotopes 203Tl and 205Tl.
Using fast neutrons, the mercury isotope 198Hg, which composes 9.97% of natural mercury, can be converted by splitting off a neutron and becoming 197Hg, which then disintegrates to stable gold. This reaction, however, possesses a smaller activation cross-section and is feasible only with un-moderated reactors.
It is also possible to eject several neutrons with very high energy into the other mercury isotopes in order to form 197Hg. However such high-energy neutrons can be produced only by particle accelerators.
In 1980, Glenn Seaborg transmuted several thousand atoms of bismuth into gold at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. His experimental technique, using nuclear physics, was able to remove protons and neutrons from the bismuth atoms. Seaborg's technique would have been far too expensive to enable the routine manufacture of gold, however.[14][15]
The problem is the energy required. In the last Seaborg experiment, it cost $10,000 to create one billionth of a cent in gold. Not exactly a profitable enterprise.
Manipulating molecules is just chemistry. Creating new atoms requires tremendous amounts of energy, and that will be cost-prohibitive until (and perhaps far beyond) something like cheap fusion technology is widespread. At that point, the economy will be so much different than it is today that I'm not sure we'll be thinking much about the price of gold. I predict we'll be mining asteroids for gold and other elements far before we get around to producing them ourselves.
