Obviously I was wrong in thinking that Kim would announce the results of tests on the GMs using the zinc fingers as soon as they were done.
(BTW it's 7 days plus 48 hours and it was approximate so "max" was not applicable.)
There are two possible explanations.
The most likely is that KBLB may prefer to wait until the silk has been tested (to see whether it is, as expected pure spider) (It would 99.999% be, because the Genetic modifications are for the purpose of remove the worm silk protein genes to prevent worm silk protein from being mixed in with the spider silk. With the worm silk protein genes removed it would be physiologically impossible for there to be an worm silk protein in the silk. There are other things that could go wrong, but, given that the worms have already produced a mixture of spider and worm silk, it is exceedingly likely that the result of the GMs will be the production of pure spider silk. For very technical reasons it may be not quite the quality of pure spider silk but should be very close to it, close enough to meet market demand for pure spider silk until a bit of genetic modification works out any bugs.
And SIAL may feel that the news of the success of the GM's would have a lot more impact if combined with news that the spiders had, as a result, produced pure spider silk. (What that would mean, for SIAL is that their new Genetic Modification tool had “rescued” a product by fixing something that a competing technology (the piggyBac transposon) had been unable to solve. The announcement of just the succes of the GMs (before the analysis of the silk) wouldn't have nearly the public impact because the public doesn't understand genetic modication tools and their limitations all that well. But worms producing spider silk would be certain to garner front page news. That's all just a guess of course. CEOs don't always see things like we think they do.
Another possibility: Inherent in zinc finger technology is that in a small percentage of cases, the zinc fingers don't work the first try. Each zinc finger selects for a specific nucleotide (the “letters of DNA: A,C,T and G), the zinc fingers are used in pairs of sets of about 18 zinc fingers each (one set for each strand of the double stranded DNA). There are many zinc fingers that will select for each nucleotide, which is fortunate because many zinc fingers don't work well together. That's what makes it so difficult to assemble a set of 18 that will work. SGMO (the company SIAL licenses the ZF tech from)figure out an algorithm to do that and most of the time it works but occasionally the set selected won't work. It's usually readily solved by “tweaking” the ZFs by changing out the zinc fingers at the point where the proper nucleotide wasn't selected. So it's just a few weeks delay if that's the case.
Bottom line: at this point it's all speculation but a delay in news would be far more likely to the due either to SIAL and/or KBLB wanting to wait until the sillk is tested or to a need to “tweak” the zinc fingers, than to a major problem.
It is inherent in the nature of research that the timing of events is tentative at best and rarely works out to be just what we expected.
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