Giders and spoats

What do you get when you cross a spider with a goat?

Actually, that’s not a joke, ’cause the guy with the glasses over there did it a few years ago. Crossed a spider with a goat, I mean. His name is Jeffrey Turner and he’s implanted spider-silk producing genes in goat embryos. The result, a herd of affectionate-looking billies and nannies (each with four legs, not eight, I counted), produce a form of the silk solution in their milk. No idea if the milk is drinkable.

Boil down the milk, process it, and you have artificial spider silk solution that can be spun out kinda the way spiders do it, although it’s only a tenth the strength of the real thing. It’s called BioSteel and it’s the product of an ailing biotech firm, Nexia. The rest of the company’s been scavenged for the parts, but the goats were moved to a new farm and are supposedly still going strong.

Gosh. I can come up with all KINDS of stories dealing with that scenario.

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