from zinc's mouth to god's ears.
RE: Today's CC etc:
I had made a misinterpretation that led to misjudging the time required for the commercialization of Monster Silk:
When KBLB said that the "Monster Hybrid" was a cross between Monster Silk worms and the large commercial worm, there were two possible interpretations of that:
1)YOU CROSS A LINE OF MONSTER SILK WORMS WITH LARGE COMMERCIAL WORMS FOR EACH AND EVERY GENERATION OF PRODUCTION WORMS: that the production worms would be bred in each generation from a homozygous Monster Silk worm and a homozygous large commercial worm resulting in a heterozygous hybrid production worm. The fact that the production worms were heterozyous hybrids would breeding your own worms from stolen production worms vastly more difficult. Because this is an excellent security measure if you plan on distributing the production worms (as eggs) to producers, I had expected that this was what KBLB would be doing and interpreted the PRs about the Monster Hybrid in this manner.
2) YOU CROSS A MONSTER SILK WORM WITH A LARGE COMMERCIAL WORM AND MAKE THE RESULTING WORM (which will be a heterozygous hybrid) HOMOZYGOUS THRU SELECTIVE BREEDING OVER SEVERAL GENERATIONS AND THEN THEY ARE THE PRODUCTION WORMS WHICH BREED THEMSELVES.
It turns out that KBLB chose the second alternative. The security issue is not a factor if you plan on producing the silk yourself and distributing it as unwoven silk fiber. (this route is actually much more secure because stolen heterozygous workers could be used to breed homozygous workers, it just takes a lot of time and work. Just keeping the worms under your control is safer. Silk contains no DNA so it's impossible to reverse engineer the worms from the silk)
In addition, when heterozygous, traits are not as strong (usually) as when they are homozygous so a homozygous worker is inherently superior to a heterozygous worker. That apparently is the biggest reason that KBLB chose to make the hybrid homozygous.
BUT THIS TAKES SEVERAL GENERATIONS TO DO. AND RAMPING UP THE POPULATION CANNOT BEGIN UNTIL AFTER THIS HAS BEEN DONE.
My failure to realize that these additional several generations were required was what led me to very falsely conclude that progress was not being made and start looking for a possible bottleneck/roadblock. (I deeply apologize to Kim and KBLB for that error. I DID clearly label it as speculation of a possibility and noted that it might be wrong.) Pretty ironic considering how frequently I warn that things often take longer than expected and how uncertain the timing is. In the future I will confine myself a lot more to explanation and do a lot less speculation (and what I do will be, as always, clearly labeled as such.)
Obviously I was very wrong about thinking that there might be some problem with homozygous Monster Silk worms. KBLB has made the worms homozygous and has been breed them as such for generations now. SO I expect to hear at the CC that Monster Silk is well along in the ramping up process (although it probably still has a bit to go - obviously Kim could not say anything about that to me before he releases it publicly).
As far as work on Gen2 goes (the 3rd round of ZF GMs = the first round of gen2): that MAY be a multistep process so the results of round 3 MAY be an intermediate step (MY SPECULATION, again, that's something Kim could not tell me before the CC).
So what I GUESS we may get from the CC is reassurance that progress is being made on the Monster Silk and on gen2 and some sort of TENTATIVE guidance as to ROUGHLY how long it may take.
From what I can see, all indications are that things are moving along at a very good pace and there is no reason at all for concern. We all need to remember that biology is inherently very complex and most of what we read about biotechnology is considerably simplified. However the full actual complexity has to be dealt with when developing products and the result is that things generally take longer than expected. "Delays" are very often only bad estimations of the time required.
