Spider Thread Milked From Goats Could Fuse Your Bones
Posted by Justin on September 10th, 2010
Hell yeah.
Spider silk milked from goats may be used to replace body’s strained tendons, ligaments and bones in the future.
In a new experiment, Professor Lewis and his team at the University of Wyoming successfully implanted the silk-making genes from a golden orb spider into a herd of goats.
Spider silk has been used for centuries to dress wounds with varying degrees of success, but the problem has until now been how to get it.
“We needed a way to produce large quantities of the spider silk proteins,” News.com.au quoted Lewis, as saying.
He added: “Spiders can’t be farmed, so that route is out and since they make six different silks, even that would not work if you could.”
It’s all fun and games until spider DNA in a goat creates a real Chupacabra…
Thanks to Weird Things reader Fracis for passing this along.
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September 10th, 2010 at 8:30 am
Went googling for this and found some more articles. This one offers some insight to the problems of spider farms:
“Spider farms tend to erupt in hairy sweatshop violence, the workers fighting and then feasting on one another.” – from http://www.hcn.org/issues/343/16920
September 10th, 2010 at 12:51 pm
No more saggy boobs in the future?
September 10th, 2010 at 1:04 pm
Did anybody ever find Goat Boy funny? I never laughed at a single Goat Boy sketch back he was on SNL.