FW: [alqld] Charlottes Pig?

[Guest guest]

My, my, what is the world coming to?

 

Charlotte's Goat

Christopher Helman, Forbes Global, 02.19.01

 

 

In a concrete bunker on a mothballed Air Force base in Plattsburgh, New

York, two Nigerian dwarf goats named Mille and Muscade joyfully munch grass

and slurp water. Oddly, they are protected from intruders by security guards

and razor wire.

 

 

Only 20 weeks old, these sister beasts warrant tight security because their

milk is highly prized by the U.S. military. Their 70,000-gene chromosomes

have been manipulated to include a gene from the orb weaver, a palm-size

spider that spins the world's toughest natural material. Researchers are

" growing " the spider's silk inside Mille and Muscade's mammary glands.

 

 

These strands of silk, just 3 microns thick, are three times as tough as

DuPont's bulletproof Kevlar. A woven cable as thick as your thumb can bear

the weight of a jumbo jet. Once perfected, the silk will be used for

featherweight ballistic vests, medical sutures and artificial ligaments.

 

 

The goats represent a promising new avenue in the controversial field of

transgenics, the science of splicing one species' genes onto the genome of

another. Most efforts, including the recent news of a disease-detecting

rhesus monkey (bred with a glowing jellyfish gene), focus on improving the

characteristics of existing organisms.

 

 

But Jeffrey Turner, the molecular geneticist behind the goat gambit and CEO

of the publicly held Nexia Biotechnologies, has more pragmatic goals. He

believes that his animals can mass-produce drugs and highly engineered

materials more cheaply and efficiently than vats and machines. Rivals

include the Pharming Group of the Netherlands, Genzyme Transgenics in

Boston, Massachusetts, and PPL Therapeutics of Scotland.

 

 

Nexia is tackling a materials-science conundrum that has stumped even DuPont

for 20 years: how to synthesize spider silk. Milking the spiders themselves

is out of the question—they're cannibals. " Put a bunch of them together and

soon you end up with one big, fat, happy spider. It's like trying to farm

tigers, " says Turner.

 

 

By injecting the orb weaver gene into the father of Mille and Muscade, Nexia

bred she-goats whose mammary glands are able to produce the complex proteins

that make up spider silk. Their milk looks and tastes like the real thing,

but once its proteins are filtered and purified into a fine white powder,

they can be spun into tough thread.

 

 

Turner got the idea while teaching at McGill University in Montreal in 1992,

after learning that scientists had isolated three spider genes that code for

silk proteins. " It was a purely serendipitous find. The silk gland of

spiders and the milk gland of goats are almost identical. Teats equal

spinnerets. "

 

 

In 1993 he founded Nexia with $2 million in venture capital. He started with

mouse embryos and graduated to goats, whose large mammary glands make better

milk machines. The Nige-rian dwarf goat was the perfect candidate, as it

begins breeding and lactating at just 13 weeks. In 1998Nexia flew 130 goats

from New Zealand to its facilities on the Plattsburgh base, so that the herd

could quickly expand.

 

 

Commercial spider silk is two years away, but Nexia's recent public offering

raised $27 million, enough to cushion losses that ran $3million last year on

$320,000 in revenue. Turner's goats may run dry if the spider silk hits it

big. His expansion plan? Spidercows.

 

 

Cameron Green [camerongreen]

Monday, 12 February 2001 13:20

alqld

[alqld] Charlottes Pig?

 

 

Scary stuff....

 

http://www.forbes.com/global/2001/0219/061.html

 

 

camerongreen

c.green

http://defy.virtualave.net

icq# 21673328

 

" A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which

the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their

army of managers control a population of slaves who do not

have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To

make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day

totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper

editors and schoolteachers. " George Orwell, foreword to 1984

(1946).

 

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