We Have Goats Milking Spider Silk and You Should Never Sleep Again
Utah State just got another $1 million grant to become the textile mills of the future.
Here’s something you don’t hear every day. Somewhere, right now, in this country, there are goats who’ve been imbued with spider genes so that when you milk them you can get the material for spider webs and the government has been funding this shit for years while you sleep and dream about a world without spider-goat monstrosities laying eggs in you.
That’s America in the twilight of 2015. That sound like freedom to you? Sounds like Gremlins 3 to me.
Anyway. Utah State just got another cool million from the Department of Defense to keep — keep, continue, proceed! — study of spider silk which would be great for bulletproof underwear and other cool stuff like that for our soldiers if we could just produce it in industrial quantities. Of course we can’t just do that with the spiders nature gave us so instead of splicing a useless bunny with a smug dolphin we went ahead and made a bunch of transgenic goats using two of the animals most likely to appear in a Satanic petting zoo. When the transgenic goats give milk they produce the spider silk protein and then we get it and keep trying to find ways to make it useful in a practical sense.
No one has been able to figure out how to cheaply separate the spider silk from the goat milk, which is the hump our spider-goats need to get over. But maybe this is the year all that changes? And that’s what some people do with their Ph.D.s. Now, a goat on a horse.
