Good post. To add emphasis to one of your points:
RE: "There is an easy answer to this question. SIAL is not in the business of loaning money. They are in business to sell their products but, they apparently do not just sell their products to every Tom, Dick and Jane research and development companies. Thus, the reason why they sent their team to the lab at Notre Dame to investigate kblb's claim of creating a recombiant spider silk from a silk worm that was 80% as strong as native spider silk. After their investigation they were confident enough in kblb's science and their scientific breakthrough that they entered into a contractual agreement to supply kblb with their ZF technology to further their research and development in creating pure spider silk from silk worms."
An important consideration is that SIAL takes payment in the form of both upfront payments and royalties on products developed.
FWICS, the upfront money appears to be just about enough to cover current operating expenses and costs and the great majority of the income and profit is anticipated to come from the royalties. So SIAL would have a very powerful interest in being very selective of its customers. This is especially true since SIAL has indicated that the demand for its ZF services is very great and it's been struggling to catch up to the demand.
SIAL/SGMO's zinc fingers have been shown to be very highly effective with exquisite precision so there's every reason to expect they'll work. The success of the Monster Silk worms at producing a mixture of spider and worm silk very strongly indicates that once KBLB has used the ZFs to remove the worm silk protein gene, making it completely impossible for any worm silk protein to be in the silk, the result will be pure spider silk. The demand is great and production facilities already exist (just switch the new worms for the old) so KBLB is on a very fast track to success. If the current round of ZF GMs is successful, KBLB should be producing pure spider silk within a year. SIAL could be getting royalties in a very short time on this one (no FDA approval needed (except for medical applications), no regulatory approval needed, no food safety testing needed, production facilities already on hand. It's hard to imagine anything with more potential for fast development. I'm sure SIAL is quite aware of that and ranks KBLB very high on its list of potential big royalty earners.
Obviously things would be better if the market conditions were better. But given the potential for KBLB's products to do things better _and_less_expensively_ it should do well whatever the market conditions. All JMHO.
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