The
practical applications of transgenics, the act of
splicing genetic material from one
animal or
plant to another, are incredible, sometimes to the level of
morbidity. In addition to the use of
jellyfish bioluminescent genes in potato plants, research labs led by
Nexia CEO
Jeffrey Turner have successfully produced two goats, Mille and Mucasade, whose
mammary glands are capable of producing the
silk of the
orb weaver spider.
The silk of this spider has such incredible
tensile strength that reportedly, a strand just three microns thick would be three times as tough as
kevlar, the material used to create most
bullet-proof vests. A woven cable less than an inch thick could theoretically bear the weight of a jumbo jet. The practical applications of such a material are self-explanatory.
This is not so seemingly
infeasible an act, however, to mean that we can now create any
protein from any animal in any other animal. The
catch is that there is simply an incredible coincidence, physically, between the
glands used to produce spider silk and mammary glands. And even now, the silk doesn't come out as it would from a spider--instead, a sort of milk is produced with the protein within it, which must be
filtered and
purified and spun. Nonetheless, the implications are remarkable. Rumor has it that if an actual demand exists for the silk, which everything indicates that it should, silk-milked
cows will be the next
logical step.
Turner, a
geneticist himself, believes that the future of transgenics seems to lie largely in
medicine. He claims that genetically bred animals will be eventually be able to
mass-produce many medicines, allowing them to be provided at
lower costs to the
public. All indications seem to suggest that this will, in many cases, be entirely feasible. Only
time will tell.