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Spider Goats Give Silk Milk - The Future Is Now With Genetic Engineering [c.2000 McClure & Trowbridge Publishing, Nash TN] Silk has superior strength and durability, but spider web is the strongest material known. Genghis Khan's armies used silk in their armour to help stop arrows. The next generation of contemporary armour may use spider silk to stop bullets. Silk is harvested from silk worms, grown en masse. Spiders, however, are territorial and cannot be raised in large numbers, so bioengineers at Nexia Biotechnologies imprinted a spider silk gland gene into a goat's mammary gland, resulting in a goat that secretes spider silk. The spider silk protein is separated from the goat milk and spun into a fiber, just like a spider spins its web from the protein. Nexia has a herd of twenty bioengineered spider goats, each of which produces spider silk equivalent to 10,000 spiders. "A silk cable as thick as your thumb would be able to haul down a jet fighter" Nexia claims. [Bunjan Sinha, PopSci 10.2000] |
"A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things." - Rear Adm. Grace Hopper Grace Hopper, a brilliant mathematician and computer programmer, was responsible for popularizing the term "computer bug" after a day attendant found a moth taped in the computer log books from the night before, with an explanation that the experimental Navy computer had malfunctioned due to "a bug" in the circuits! Hopper headed the team that invented COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) (1958-1960). COBOL is still the most widely used computer programming language in businesses. Grace also attained the lofty heights of Rear Admiral in the US Navy, in an era before womens lib when a college educated woman was a rarity, much less a woman at the highest ranks in the US Military. She was a remarkable woman. [c.2000 McClure & Trowbridge Publishing] Genetic Savings and Clone is working with a team at Texas A&M University to bank the genes of your fave critter until research is further along and your pets may be cloned. "Operation Copy Cat" is working in conjunction with the "Missyplicity Project" team at TAMU. "Missy" may be the first dog ever cloned. She's a thirteen year old border collie - siberian husky mix who belongs to a wealthy San Francisco family. The family has donated $2.3 million for the research to double their family dog. Lou Hawthorne, CEO of Genetic Savings and Clone, says cloning your pet should be much cheaper, "under $20,000", once the technology is developed with Missyplicity. [OFA 2001] SEE ALSO: Savings And Clone.com |