Genetically Engineered Silkworms Spin Spider Silk

disco_tracy writes "Silkworms have been modified to produce spider silk, creating a fabric that could be used in everything from bulletproof clothing to artificial tendons." For some reason, this is far less revolting to me than the idea of spider silk being milked out of goats.

Comments

Re:Cool

[EdIII]

Why?

For a lot of reasons. It's being pursued without any caution whatsoever. Look at the Nazi scientists at Monsanto. Nearly killed the Monarch butterflies and have actively researched and implemented "death codes" into their projects to protect intellectual property that should have never been granted. Technology aside, they are far more damaging than the entertainment Mafiaa to the world with their lawsuits, strong arm tactics, reduced seed diversity, and just plain extortion of farmers the world over.

Cool technology to be sure, but the people that are involved in it certainly don't seem to have humanity's interests at heart.

Not to mention I feel that not enough research is really conducted to determine if the GMO food they are producing is really healthy in the first place. What are the real affects to humans eating it? Animals eating it? Affect on the environment in which it is grown (Monarch Butterflies again)?

BTW, the poster said critical of the technology, and did not indicate any level of disinterest. I am greatly interested in GMO technology, but pursued correctly and safely and absolutely without any ridiculous BS of the deathcodes being inside it..

You don't have to be crazy or disinterested in GMO to be highly critical of companies like Monsanto. I am sure someone will claim that I am trolling, ignorant, and misinformed of GMO. Perhaps that is true. My statements regarding Monsanto though, stand on well-known facts. Just maybe, maybe, GMO might be more accepted if Monsanto had never been formed as a company.

FEH

[Anonymous Coward]

I am tired of the ridiculous "ten times stronger than Kevlar" or "ten times stronger than steel" and such garbage.

For the record: Kevlar is not particularly strong, compared to other high-end materials. What it is though, is ductile - that is, absorbs a nice amount of energy while being plastically deformed. Spider silk does this even better.

Steel can be had in strengths that vary between as low as 200 MPa (bad cast iron) to 3000 MPa (piano wire).
Kevlar is somewhere at 800 MPa or so - stronger than regular construction steel (235-420 MPa) but weaker than hardened sheet steel (900-1300 MPa).
The strongest material you may encounter outside of a laboratory is glass fiber, which can reach strengths of up to 5000 MPa.
Carbon fiber is weaker (~2000 MPa) than glass fiber, but it is more rigid - which is the sought after property most of the time.
Titanium, while having some nice properties, isn't incredibly strong either - around 1000 MPa at best.

Even when considering density, steel usually holds its own quite well - especially when designing things that are supposed to have a certain rigidity, where steel really shines - and while exotic materials may have advantages they are never along the line of "ten times", more like "two times" at best.

I'm a mechanical design engineer and I am really not amused when people show me their titanium golf clubs and claim that it is ten times stronger than steel an cost a hundred times more than gold, or other preposterous claims like that. Titanium is $100/kg, tops.

Re:Almost there

[ultranova]

Double the points if the silk worms will start catching flies instead of eating 104 kg of mulberry leaves for each kilo of silk.

Triple the points if the worms escape, block the doors to the laboratory with unbreakable spider silk sheet, then eat the scientists.

Quadruple them if they somehow mutate into an army of Shelobs and terrorize the general population.