Blue......."My Wave dream is hanging by a spider thread"
Blue then your Wave dream is as safe as houses lol......!!
There is no Better thread to hang on with than BioSteel!
Sell your Wave shares & buy Nexia instead,& then i
believe God indeed has shown mercy on us all......:)
Doma.
BY WALTER TRUETT ANDERSON, PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
One of the most amazing substances in nature is the light, flexible, yet
incredibly strong material spiders spin out to catch unsuspecting flies
and other insects.
Now a Canadian company is on the verge of manufacturing it in quantities,
and by a most surprising method -- in the milk of transgenic goats. If
the project succeeds -- which seems highly likely -- the product, called
"BioSteel" -- may soon be used for a variety of applications, from
medical sutures to bulletproof vests to space stations.
The process may also mark a significant step toward the production of
other biomaterials -- and the beginnings of a new kind of industrial
revolution, based on the use of organic processes instead of minerals.
Spiderweb silk has a tensile strength of 300,000 pounds per square inch
and is both stronger and lighter than compounds based on steel or
petrochemicals. Its impressive properties have been known for a long
time, and people have dreamed of being able to produce it for their own
uses, perhaps the way the ancient Chinese learned to produce silk from
silkworms.
But spiders -- aggressive and territorial -- aren't as easily
domesticated as the amiable silkworm. More recently, various
biotechnology researchers have tried producing spider silk the way they
produce medically useful proteins such as human insulin. This involves
inserting the gene for the desired material into bacteria, and then
producing larger quantities of it through fermentation. But that produced
only a gooey substance with little similarity to the natural product, and
no commercial value.
Researchers at Nexia Biotechnologies in Montreal thought there might be a
better way -- putting the spider-silk gene into milk animals. From spider
to cow or goat may sound like a huge leap, but in a way it was logical,
since there are close anatomical similarities between the silk-producing
glands of spiders and the milk-producing glands of ruminant animals. When
evolution figures out a way to do something, it often does it with
different variations in many different species.
The scientists' first efforts in the laboratory involved splicing the
spider-silk gene into cells taken from the mammary glands of large
animals. The silk genes worked with amazing efficiency in the mammary
cells, and Nexia scientists were soon producing high-quality spider silk
through cell culture. They then produced a line of transgenic mice to see
how it would work in living animals.
That experiment also succeeded. The next step was to get the gene into
some full-size milk-producing animals. They selected a type of African
goat known for its ability to begin reproducing and lactating at an early
age -- as early as three months after birth.
The first transgenic goats will be born this summer. If the goats perform
as expected when they mature, Nexia will have the beginnings of a
breeding stock, and a working spider-silk dairy early next year. Then the
challenge will be to extract the pure silk protein from the milk and spin
it into fabric by processes roughly comparable to the way artificial
fabrics are manufactured from petrochemical solutions.
Nexia's CEO, Jeffrey Turner, thinks the first uses of BioSteel will be in
medicine -- for sutures, possibly for artificial tendons or ligaments.
Farther down the line, it might be the stuff of bulletproof vests lighter
and stronger than those currently in use, for the coatings of space
stations, perhaps even in bridges or other structures.
It is of course a bit early to know where this will lead, but we live in
fast-moving times when technological changes often leap ahead of the most
optimistic imagination. Clearly it advances a new field of biotechnology
-- biomaterials -- which could be not only commercially viable but also
have more appeal to environmentalists than some other biotechnology
products, since spider silk is both a renewable resource and a
biodegradable material.
In some ways this work recalls the dreams of the social philosophers of
the early 1900s, who speculated about a shift to "biotechnic" industries
in which biological production systems would replace the inorganic
machines of the factory and end (or at least reduce) reliance on
mineral-based materials.
(07211999) **** END **** (c) COPYRIGHT PNS
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
