Oxygen-17 (17O) is a low-abundance, natural, stable isotope of oxygen (0.0373% in seawater; approximately twice as abundant as deuterium).
As the only stable isotope of oxygen possessing a nuclear spin (+5/2) and a favorable characteristic of field-independent relaxation in liquid water, 17O enables NMR studies of oxidative metabolic pathways through compounds containing 17O (i.e. metabolically produced H217O water by oxidative phosphorylation in mitochondria[3]) at high magnetic fields.
The neutron flux slowly converts 17O (with much greater cross section) in the cooling water to carbon-14, an undesirable product that can escape to the environment: Some tritium removal facilities make a point of replacing the oxygen of the water with natural oxygen (mostly 16O) to give the added benefit of reducing 14C production.
[4][5] The isotope was first hypothesized and subsequently imaged by Patrick Blackett in Rutherford's lab in 1925:[6] Of the nature of the integrated nucleus little can be said without further data.
If it is stable it should exist on the earth.It was a product out of the first man-made transmutation of 14N and 4He2+ conducted by Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford in 1917–1919.