I'm not at all certain that you are meaning the same thing I meant by "The direction of the company is already well established and the critical development essentially completed."
What I meant by the "direction of the company" is the general business plan: 1) put the Gen1 Monster Silk on the market and get money from it 2) finish modifying silkworms to produce pure spider silk (quite possibly already achieved as I type this, if not very close to it) 3) put the pure spider silk on the high tech materials market 4) using the 200 spider genes and the zinc fingers already contracted for to make custom modifications for the high tech market as requested.
Note that I most certainly did not say that the company is well established, just the direction that it intends to take. I have a hard time imagining how anyone could have much disagreement with that much.
By "the critical development essentially completed" I meant that the critical development (which IMHO is the genetic modification of silkworms to produce pure spider silk) is very close to being completed. This is obviously just my opinion but I have good reasons for believing so and have detailed them before. The worms have produced a mixture of spider silk and worm silk. Their silk spinning apparatus is therefore not inherently incompatible with spider silk. What remains is to remove/disable the gene(s) coding for worm silk protein so that only spider silk is produced. There is very little doubt that the zinc fingers will accomplish the removal/disabling of the genes. It is remotely (IMHO) possible that some property of worm silk protein lacking in spider silk protein is necessary for the successful spinning of silk so it's not a sure thing. But with current tools at hand even such a problem might be overcome without too much cost or delay. You might, for example, need to do a BLAST search on the spider for chaperon sequence and then do a gene expression array chip to determine which ones are expressed during silk spinning and the same for the worm and then replace the worm sequence with the spider sequence same as was done for the silk genes.
I guess we apparently disagree on how hard that might be.
To further clarify: to me the critical development is getting worms to spin spider silk (even if it has some worm silk in with it). That's already been done
Removing the worm silk from that mixture to me is, relatively speaking, a "tweak" especially using zinc fingers. And is probably very close to comletion, IMHO, if not even already done.
