Spider-Goat is Real But is Not Marvel Affiliated
Please note that this month's letter contains discussion of spiders, but doesn't contain any images of spiders, just an image of our charming little prince up there.
Bear with me, because you’re not going to find out why I’m researching commercial spider silk for several years. It’s a secret. A very self-indulgent secret that amuses me, that Ty won't stop giggling about.
But, the research I’m doing in the service of my self-indulgent secret still makes for an interesting little story, that I wanted to share with you.
Our story begins in the 1800s, in French colonized Madagascar.
A Jesuit missionary named Paul Camboué developed an obsession with the idea of utilizing spider silk, instead of silkworm silk, to create textiles from.
That struck me as a bizarre investment plan at first, but it turns out that spider silk is stronger than steel or Kevlar, but elastic enough to stretch up to 40% without breaking. Meaning that if you were making textiles out of it, you could have stretchable, comfortable, incredibly durable cloth that keeps you cool and doesn’t wear out. That obviously has value. (more on the Kevlar comparison later).
And since colonizing is all about finding as many ways of extracting resources from the colonized land and people as possible, Camboué set about extracting.
Madagascar is home to the golden orb spider- which, legs included, is the size of a human hand. It’s silk is naturally a bright, regal saffron gold, and it can spin 80 feet of silk in a single go. The silk doesn’t need any carding, spinning or processing to be used. It’s ready for weaving, because it’s grown for weaving.
It also bites. It’s venom isn’t enough to endanger a human being, but they do bite. I’ve read that it hurts about as much as a bee sting.
So Camboué hired Malagasy schoolgirls to catch the spiders in baskets, bring them back to his factory, and strap them into these little devices that look sort of like stocks, with their bitey bits on one side of a wall, and their abdomen on the other. The girls would then pull the silk from their abdomen in long, unbroken threads. The spiders would then be released back into the park to feed and manage themselves. Farming spiders, it turns out, is difficult due to their tendency to bite each other’s heads off when kept in captivity.
The eventual end result was a sort of proof-of concept: a bed canopy measuring 4ft by 10ft, which was exhibited at the Paris World fair in 1900: a treasure to flaunt on the world stage.
But, clearly, spider silk never took off as an industry. We don’t all own a bunch of golden spider silk clothes. The experiment didn’t scale.
But the dream never died. Spider silk is just too tempting a prospect.
Fast forward exactly 110 years, and a team-up emerges to try again: The University of Wyoming, Utah State University, and a Montreal based company called Nexia Biotechnologies.
As an aside, I’m persistently in awe of how unabashedly futuristic the names of these sorts of companies are. This is from 12 years ago and sounds like a made up scifi company the future. Probably an evil company, but we’ll dive into that more some other day. I just really enjoy making these companies up for my books because the sky is the limit. There is no ceiling on how lofty and fantastical and cliché you can be while it being utterly realistic.
This team up has a new plan: to genetically modify goats to produce the spider silk protein in their milk. Milk has proteins in it already, so if they could flip around some genes they could make their very own spider-goats.
I think it’s a testament to how difficult spiders must be to farm that goats were considered easier. I guess, at least goats don’t literally bite each other’s heads off in captivity. (If I’m wrong about that, don’t tell me. I wish to remain in ignorance.)
And it worked. By 2012 they had 3 spider-goats producing spidersilk enriched goat milk. The goats themselves were described as being otherwise totally normal, healthy goats. And, being quite a bit bigger than spiders, they could produce quite a bit more spider silk protein than the arachnids whose genes they carried.
The material made with the spider silk protein was 40% as strong as actual spider silk. And, it has properties that make it especially desirable for medical procedures- something about the spider silk is better tolerated by human beings than traditional sutures and fake ligaments.
Apparently, that wasn’t enough. Shortly after, Nexia Biotechnologies went bust, and the goats were sent to the Canadian Agricultural Museum in Ottawa. I couldn’t find any record of what happened to them after public outcry, led to the display being removed. I just found a record of a local Anthropology Professor referring to the genetic modification of the goats “shocking” and “fundamentally wrong”. The museum claimed the display was meant to inform, not endorse, but regardless, the goats were removed.
But we’ve all read and watched enough scifi to know that that’s not going to stop companies from pursuing something, not with a potential cash cow like this up for grabs.
In 2016 we have Kraig BioCraft Laboratories on the scene, which was founded with the explicit mission to genetically engineer “a new generation of biological materials” for medical and military use, and with at least some ambition towards mass marked products as well.
This time, the money came mostly from the deep pockets of US military contracts. Remember the comparison of spider silk and Kevlar? That’s right, Kraig was aiming to make body armor out of genetically engineered spider silk.
But, their manufacturing was set mainly in Vietnam. Specifically, in areas that have been growing silk with good old fashioned silkworms for hundreds of years.
You see, the reason the goat silk was weaker than spider silk is that only part of spider silk strength comes from the proteins. The rest comes from the complicated way the spider’s body assembled those proteins into super-strong strands. The goats had no structures in their bodies analogous to spinnerets, so could only synthesize proteins. But silk worms naturally do exactly that with their own silk.
And, they don’t bite or constantly murder each other, unlike spiders (and maybe goats?).
DragonSilk, and it’s twin product MonsterSilk (seriously they have to be trying to sound like grandiose scifi products at this point) made quite a splash in the corners of the world that salivate over commercially available, high-end body armor.
I personally can’t quite get over that I’m living in a future with genetically engineered spider body armor. That just exists now.
Reportedly, DragonSilk is 37% stronger than spider silk, combining aspects of both silkworm silk and spider silk.
And the team that created them is still going- working to ramp up production, and also to somehow create biomaterials with innate antibacterial qualities for medical uses, and also some ion-related goals that, frankly, I don’t understand at all.
Obviously, writing near-future scifi with genetic engineering, I have to assume that this technology not only exists in my books, but is being put to a wide array of weird uses, because humans will always find ways to make things weirder than they are, and then get used to that and call it normal.
So you can expect spider genes to feature in Second Sentinels books, even if nobody develops any “spidey-senses” from them.
I keep meaning to say, here, that if you know about stuff like this- weird tech in the pipeline or at the bleeding edge of technology, I am all ears. Obviously, I am fascinated, and, in the immortal words of horse_ebooks on twitter “everything happens so much.” I miss stories and news. There’s just so much of it. So please, feel free to write and share with me!
I’ll close out by letting you know that Secondhand Origin Stories is part of a free book exchange this month! Secondhand Origin Stories is always free, obviously, but if you’d like to manage the encroaching cold and darkness of winter with some free books, the theme of this book bundle is “hope”, which I think it always a good concept to center, especially this time of year, and there are Forty six books.
The link goes live Dec 1st, so please go and get em!
With Thanks, as Always,
Lee Brontide
Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails, or send them an invitation to sign up here. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories is available for free as an ebook here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop.