So what this means is that the code for making silk in a spider is written in exactly the same language as the code for making goats' milk. And all life is made of, or by, proteins. All life is based on an alphabet of just four letters, which, when arranged in the right order, spell out proteins. Given the bewildering diversity of life on Earth, this system is incredibly conservative. The instructions for all creatures that have ever lived (as far as we know) are written in the code of DNA tucked away in the heart of living cells.
We hope within a couple of years that we're going to be testing to see exactly the best designs and the best materials we can make from it." We've done some studies that show that you can put it in the body and you don't get inflammation and get ill. "We already know we can make it strong enough as an elastic. "In the medical field, we already know that we can produce spider silk that's good enough to be used in ligament repair," he tells me. It has amazing, and desirable, properties, which is why Randy's seemingly bizarre research is so robustly funded. With a glass rod, we delicately lift out a single fibre of what is very obviously spider silk and spool it on to a reel. We milk Freckles together and process it in the lab to leave only the silk proteins.
#GOAT SOUNDS LIKE OLD MAN COMIC FULL#
Now, when Freckles lactates, her milk is full of spider-silk protein. This genetic circuit was then inserted in an egg and implanted into a mother goat. "They're very cannibalistic." He and his team took the gene that encodes dragline silk from an orb-weaver spider and placed it among the DNA that prompts milk production in the udders. "The trouble is, you can't farm spiders," Randy says with an almost comic deadpan face. All livestock and arable has been carefully bred, each cross being a genetic experiment of its own. In a sense, spider-goats are an extension of the farming we've been doing for 10,000 years. It really has some amazing properties for any kind of a fibre." "We're interested in dragline silk – the silk that spiders catch themselves with when they fall," he tells me in his midwest lilt. So although a creature that is part goat, part spider might seem like an idea born of science fiction, as far as Randy is concerned it's simply advanced farming: breeding animals to produce things that we want. The farm is a university outpost where they research modern farming techniques, teach animal husbandry and raise what are inevitably referred to as "spider-goats".Randy, like many of the other scientists here in Logan, Utah, has farming in his blood. I've been tracking this emerging field since finishing my PhD in genetics 10 years ago, but intensely in the last year as a presenter for the BBC's flagship science strand, Horizon.įreckles is the creation of Randy Lewis, a professor of genetics at Utah State University. But our mastery of manipulating DNA has evolved into an even more extreme form of tinkering, broadly called "synthetic biology". Freckles is the result of genetic engineering. If 20th-century biology was about taking living things apart to find out how they work, the current era is defined by putting them back together, but not necessarily as evolution decreed, and certainly without the clumsy constraints of mating.
That is what we can now do with genetics: extreme crossbreeding.
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