Complete the following:
Setting:
A well known and sometimes off-beat technology commentator explores new breakthroughs on a popular TV science and tech show.
Story:
- Spiders’ silk is incredibly strong, but in short supply (ever tried harvesting silk from a spider?).
- So why not take the gene responsible for making spider silk, and splice it into a goat?
- The result: goats that produce milk laced with spider silk-protein.
- All you have to do then is extract the protein from the milk and spin it into silk and hey presto – a plentiful supply of a super-strong, incredibly versatile, “natural” material.
How should the story end?
There’s a serious point to this question, which I’ll come back to later. For now though, I’m intrigued as to how people think the story should conclude – remembering this is a TV show for a broad audience.
The spider/goat stuff is real btw – check out this snippet from the US National Science Foundation.
[Update 11/2/10 – the follow-up blog to this piece has just been posted]
The answer to your question about harvesting spider silk is “yes”, and, Andrew, you may recall the technique when I mention it. KR May developed it for at Porton Down lab in the 1950s for capturing airborne particles and described it in several publications, eg http://mic.sgmjournals.org/cgi/reprint/51/3/353.pdf . The threads can be very fine, giving them a high capture efficiency, and are strong and sticky. Warren Spring lab developed small rectangular frames a few cm long for the purpose. From the centre of each shorter side extended a short prong. You placed a very small spider (they make the finest threads) on one of the long sides. It tries to escape by letting itself down on an escape thread, and you hold the frame by the prongs and spin it so that the thread winds over and over between the long sides as the spider lets out more thread. You can then store it until you are ready to intercept your particles. A similar technique had been used in the cloud physics lab in Sydney where I worked in the 1960s, but there the problem was poisonous spiders which various people brought in from their gardens and offered! Sorry not to answer your main question.
Thanks Trevor – I remember the technique well, and the research on which this piece was based brought it to mind! (I recall still having a silk harvesting kit in the lab when I was at the Health & Safety Labs).
Sans the goat! This has implications in for tissue engineering, and the general art of regulating gene expression. Who is to say you “need a goat” when it just so happens to be that it has the correct basis. Why could we not instead make an artificial biological “organ” that could accomplish similar feats. I know, i know, metabolic transformation… the feed stock, how you going to do it in an artificial system. But ahh the potential is there and how great it would be to had a factory with hanging artificial udders spewing out spider silk 24/7.
wahahhahah!
so in other words the story should end by the researchers realizing they don’t need the goat but only better networking with other scientist and some way to lure researchers into the “correct” topics… perhaps women, men, booze, money, what have you.
Of course 🙂
Well only answer # 4 will preserve the commentator’s reputation as a bit offbeat and keep his show on the air. Especially since he’s working on such an old story. Goats are apparently passe, they make lots of protein but it’s too hard (so far) to spin it. The next attempt was to use plants or bacteria, but you’ve still got the same problem. So the most recent effort to hit the newstands is to use worms — which know how to spin silk, of course, and are much easier to colonize than spiders. See http://news.discovery.com/tech/spider-silk-silkworms-genetic-engineering.html or just google “spider silk worms” and you’ll see several recent stories. None of which, from my quick glances, take approaches #2 or #3.
A personal note just for the curious. I remember the goat silk story because it was used in a journalism-for-scientists session at the 2002 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. Our assignment, given the Science article describing the work, was to write the lede for a general interest story. Then-NASW-president Deborah Blum liked mine, which went something like this: “Bulletproof vests from spider silk? It’s stronger than steel or Kevlar. But it takes an awful lot of spiders to spin a vest. That’s why scientists from the Army’s Natick Soldier Research Center have enlisted mammals to aid with the task.”
The original goat work, by a Canadian company working with the Natick folks, was pretty well covered at the time. I remember an NPR piece, and several newspaper stories were distributed for discussion after we wrote our own ledes.
You’re ahead of me here Phil 🙂 Will reveal the motivation for the piece soon…
I ended up picking the answer I would hope to see after fighting off my inner cynic to pick the answer that I’d bet on seeing *cough thelastone cough* 🙂
Huh – didn’t count on it randomizing the list each time. Oh well.
Not really on entirely on topic, but fyi as concerns harvesting spider silk apparently it is a very old idea:
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/spidersilk/
A textile spun from orb spiders requiring more than 70 people collecting silk from spiders that were caught and then released on a daily basis!
Hi Andrew! Very interesting question. I had no idea this spider/goat thing had been around so long. I first heard about it a couple years at a conference when Dr. Frank Ko (University of British Columbia) mentioned that he’d done this to make spinning easier as he focuses on “the development of continuous nanocomposite fibrils by co-electrospinning.” hmmm…I will link to this from the posting I did a while back on spiders, silk, and goats…Cheers, Maryse
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