Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[ZincFinger]

For all those that doubt that the worms will reproduce themselves:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendelian_inheritance

ignorance can be a dangerous thing.

I've said this many times here before:

The first generation of a genetic modification is always heterozygous. That's enough to test whether the modification was successful (i.e.: that the desired gene modifications were accomplished) and to test whether the gene modifications do what they are expected to do. (In the current case the genetic modification is the deletion of the silkworm silk protein gene to prevent it from making worm silk protein (so all that's left will be the spider silk protein that these worms are already making)

It is physiologically impossible for the worms to make any worm silk protein once the gene for worm silk protein has been removed. There is no scientific doubt on that point whatsoever. None. NADA. End of story. For exactly the same reason that a programmable robot cannot produce anything if it doesn't have a program.

A heterozygous animal won't "breed true" when crossed with itself: some, but not all, of its offspring will have the important traits but some won't. That is dead standard and no problem whatsoever: what you do is to cross them for a few generations and select the ones with the best combinations of genes and after that you get an animal that is homozygous for all relevant traits and that animal will breed true (which is what KBLB has already done with the Gen1 Monster Silk worms. It had to get them homozygous in order to be able to cross them with the already homozygous large commercial worm and get production worms - which will NOT breed true (because they will all be heterozygous. And you DON'T WANT them (the production worms) to breed true because you don't want anyone to be able to steal them and breed a bunch of production worms for themselves. (KBLB will breed the production worms themselves and ship them out as frozen eggs. That way they keep control of the breeding worms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendelian_inheritance

It's only a couple of pages, it's not that deep and you need to understand a bit of it if this kind of thing bothers you.