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ZincFinger

06/21/11 9:01 PM

#25141 RE: kblbpatience #25137

OK when you get to specific uses and degree of market penetration, you're getting outside my area of strength.

Gen1 is basically a marked improvement on traditional silk. Use in the clothing and accessories market where silk is already used is fairly obvious. There are some uses where silk wasn't quite good enough where Monster silk will extend the market: maybe friction linings, for example. I do a lot of backpacking and know that silk inner socks provide an excellent friction reducer. Maybe Monster Silk would be even better. Maybe it would work in some uses where silk couldn't stand up to the wear, especially where it's built into the product.

I believe that silk strands are used in some swirled fiber or chopped strand type products and it appears that it's in exactly one such usage area that KBLB is having it's product tested by a company making products "for structural integrity and protection".

It should be remembered that both Monster silk and spider silk have a lot of stretch which is good for some uses and not others (someones already noted that pure spider silk would not be good for sails as stretch is a most undesirable quality there.

Gen2 is where it really starts to get interesting. Just think Kevlar and then replacing it with spider silk. IMHO spider silk would replace Kevlar for just about everything except where Kevlar is already clearly entirely adequate and more expense wouldn't be justified.

Note that cost is an important factor: for example fishing line might be a very good application, certainly it would be stronger and finer (so less visible to fish) but the stretch might be a problem (might make it hard to set the hook and might make it too difficult to let off on the pressure fast enough when needed (I'm not a fisherman, don't know) And it quite likely might just be way too expensive for that use. My point here is that it's not enough to just say it's stronger and stretchier so it's better. You have to match the properties against each individual application. (Which is why the later generation custom tailored product will be so valuable).

IMHO a really big area could be unspun spider silk protein. That can already be produced in goat's milk, but very uneconomically.
"Analogues" (but not quite the same)of spider silk protein can also be produced in bacteria (very doubtful that's close enough, bacteria aren't even eukaryotes and just couldn't do enough of the right things, IMHO, and yeast which is closer but still couldn't do it quite right but could probably do it considerably cheaper, especially if it can be made to excrete it. My guess is that bacterial production just won't cut it, that goat's milk is way too expensive, but yeast will be cheaper and good enough for some but by no means all of the "spider silk protein" market. But extracting spider silk protein directly from cocoons (without reeling and spinning which are what require the high labor costs) would probably be economical and fill a lot of needs that yeast produced spider silk protein analogue wasn't good enough for. But what portion of the market each would get is probably anyone's guess right now. Certainly yeast produced spider silk protein would probably be used for things like biodegradable cups and things like that (which would never be able to justify the cost of real spider silk protein).

And, of course for the really high tech stuff that needs the highest strength possible, it will be spider silk produced in silkworms at first and later KBLB's next generation of enhanced spider silks (fortified with metals, etc.)

This development is so fundamental a change that there really isn't any way to even know what all the uses will be, much less estimate value etc. Think of the laser: when they first came out most thought they were just a cute lab trick, then star wars weaspons to shoot down ICBMs (ironically one of the very few things they haven't been used for). Now we use them in CD players, presentation pointers, measuring tools, leveling tools, guide lines for circular saws, cutting steel and other materials, sensors,...the list could go for hundreds of pages!

But what's the need to do it anyway? We know that the properties will be vastly superior to anything else for many uses, we know that the properties will be able to be tailored and adapted for various uses (the 20 lines of Gen1 with widely varying properties have already demonstrated that). We know that silk (properly treated) is highly biocompatible and the number of potential uses in medicine, both as fiber and as plastic (cast spider silk protein) is simply enormous. Some things simply defy calculation.

(One use we can forget about IMHO, is a "space elevator". Only carbon nanotubes have enough strength for that (and anything with stretch is definitely out!) (Personally I'm not at all sure that concept is nearly as good as it's made out to be anyway. Many very serious problems have been overlooked or glossed over. I predict that the space elevator will be like fusion for electrical generation: just around the corner for many decades)