Silk in milk

My favorite superhero is from a British sitcom called Thermo Man. You don’t need to have seen it to know what I am talking about. Thermo Man has all the super-human traits of Superman, except that my hero has amnesia, a wife and a little boy who is still lugged around in a stroller. His family and his neighbors who know his dual identity, all try their best to make him remember that he can stop a meteor from hitting Earth, that he has X-ray vision, and that he can scare Godzilla away but still make it in time for dinner. I think there is nothing more ironic than a superpower who does not remember that he is one. Irony always meets a writer’s slant and that would explain my odd preference for this superhero. But for the majority of superheroes, I think we churn them out from the creamy nooks of our imagination so that we can fuse whatever traits we find desirable in the natural world and lock them all in beings who can swing, crawl and leap tall buildings in a single bound, run in a flash, swim like a fish, hear like a dog, carry trains with one hand, and hurl tractors at the enemy, but still in moments that matter, behave as decent, polite human beings even if they wear their underwear over their pants.

While it is still a debate on how much we should rely on Nature or nurture to breed human beings with a combination of traits we think are desirable, it may surprise most of you to know that ever since we learned that the secret of natural life is in the genes, we have been producing "super creatures" of sorts. "Super" in the sense that they have "extra powers" produced by a specific gene, absent in their parents. We have been inserting genes from one creature on to another to make the transferee creature produce or behave a certain way, which the gene from the other creature is believed to be responsible for. It is called transgenics: "the transfer of a specific gene from one organism to another." And it is not new. It has been going on for a while. I have mentioned transgenics and the glowing bunny "Alba" in a column entitled "Solaris Eve" about two years ago. A gene responsible for emitting a green fluorescent protein from a Pacific jellyfish called Aequorea Victoria was inserted in Alba when she was just an egg. I do not know yet what particularly useful purpose in Nature it serves a bunny to glow in the dark, save for it being cute and as early proof that transgenics is possible but learning more about transgenics now, I find that it is mostly a question of what purpose it will serve us humans. These are the aims of these transgenic farms, according to an article by Lawrence Osborne in the New York Times Magazine (Best American Science Writing. NY: HarperCollins, 2003).

Osborne visited Nexia, one of the three transgenic farms in the world and discovered how goats are made to produce milk made of spider silk. Two questions come to mind: Why and how? Spider silk is made of seven different kinds of silk and its strong and tensile capacities rival that of steel. But the silky, fine quality of silk makes it suitable for human artifacts that rely on fiber materials like maybe, as Nexia pointed out to Osborne, fishing lines, tennis rackets or even lining for armored vests. But that only answers half of "why" because why not just farm a gazillion spiders that could produce silk and leave the goats alone? Because spiders are mostly solitary and in farm proportions, they would eat each other. On the other hand, goats, particularly the West African dwarf goats that Nexia uses, breed all year round and can be kept in farm population levels. And what can goats regularly produce a lot of? Milk. So there you go, milk you can wear, play tennis or even stop bullets with. So how do they produce spidergoats? The spider is, as Osborne described it, "frozen in liquid nitrogen and then grounded into a brown powder" which is a technical euphemism for certain death. Then, the silk-making gene which is in every cell of the spider, is extracted from the spider and "switched on" to mean that it will only be programmed to be active in the mammary glands of the goat so that it is the milk that will be silky and not other things that come out of the goat. This "programmed gene" is then inserted into a goat’s egg which will mature into a well, a spidergoat. No blockbuster movies in the horizon for this goat though, just lots of silk-milk that is looking at what Osborne estimated to be a $1.6-billion dollar market for industrial fibers.

Transgenics is already in our midst even as bio-ethicists question its appropriateness. The easiest criticism to hurl at transgenics is that it is not "natural" since left alone, Nature will not yield "spidergoats." That is not a very good criticism since we have no way of knowing what mutations Nature will yield left to itself in given periods of time. This is the crux of the issue then – time. Nature takes a lot longer to come up with mutations as stark as a spider-goat. For pro-transgenics, on the other hand, what they are doing is just "bio-mimicry," i.e., imitating what works in Nature even if it means fusing them to suit certain purposes by making use of biotech tools and processes. But whose purposes? And what do we know of its long-term effects before we do to other creatures what we now do to spiders and goats?

I have no way of knowing if the West African Dwarf goat minds that being part-spider has doomed her to the silk road forever. But I bet it would blow Darwin’s mind if he knew of this spider-goat. He would fall off his chair if he finds out that the cause of the mutation which would have taken thousands or millions of years to happen in Nature left alone was not for the goat’s defense against predators or even better milk for its young but to fill the human need for a better tennis racket.

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