Lewis was talking about what all companies working on spider silk are doing, including KBLB (by the mention of silkworms).
True he is mainly interested in promoting his current projects. But if lumping what KBLB is doing along with the rest would improve the impression of his current projects do you think he wouldn't do it? [note that in the articles about the "bullet proof skin (which was made from silk from KBLB's silkworms!) he was not shy about getting his goats a lot of attention and it NOT being clear that they were NOT the source of the silk in the project. So we know he works that way.] ONLY KBLB is working with a technology that will allow it to SYSTEMATICALLY created multiple, inexpensive, rapid and routine modifications allowing it to create a wide range of silks. (A PLANNED and THOROUGH range, not a random and spotty range like the one left over from early development like Dr. Lewis's team will have. (and note that THEIR range will, because of the nature of its creation, be concentrated at the lower end)) The rest have to do each individual silk variation as another project with all the additional time, money and uncertainty of success that implies. The only reason they'll have a "range" is their leftovers from trials with inadequate results.
"With the silk worm, Lewis says researchers used a cloning kit to combine proteins, enabling the silk worm to spin the cocoon themselves to get fibers that combined super silk and spider silk." The "cloning kit" clearly refers to KBLB using SIAL/SGMO's zinc fingers IMHO.
In addition his work with KBLB was specifically for modifying the spider silk protein (and KBLB has those 200 spider genes to work with). It would be inevitable that a lot of that work was geared toward the variations in silk proteins that KBLB was planning to do.
In the light of all that IMHO his remarks on the variations apply to KBLB far more than they do to his team, whether he meant it that way or not. Undoubtedly his team has variation in their fibers quality. But the BEST he can mention is "we are about halfway there" (which I also suspect refers to Nexia which was only 40% of spider silk or about exactly the same as silkworm silk).
"Though still in the research phase, Lewis says researchers have already generated fibers with widely differing mechanical properties, depending upon which spider silk proteins are used. “We have ones that have very, very high elongations; we have ones that have very low elongations; we have ones that have high-tensile strengths; and we have ones that have much more moderate tensile strengths,” Lewis says."
The problem is that (by mentioning silkworm work) he is including KBLB in the mix (after all KBLB/ND are among researchers working on spider silk). He's just not at all clear about who is doing what (just as he was not clear about where the silk for the "bulletproof skin" came from. Am I the only one that sees a pattern here?
AI
