Silk comes from the milk of squirrels!!
Jeffrey Turner is putting his career and his money on the line. A molecular biologist and president of Nexia Biotechnologies, Inc., he hopes that a herd of goats will make history when the milk they produce contains the essence of spider webs. The biotechnicians at Nexia have inserted the golden orb weaver spider's silk-producing gene into the genetic code of the goats in their herd.
Why would anyone do that? Pound for pound, the gossamer threads created by orb spiders are five times stronger than steel. The uses for such a strong, flexible material are limitless. Fishing line, clothing, airbags, even sutures and artificial tendons! The reason spider silk hasn't been woven into our everyday lives sooner is that spider silk cannot be farmed in large quantities. Spiders are predators and will eat each other.
This attempt at harvesting spider silk from goats is only one of the latest attempts at biomimicry, a rapidly growing field in which designers and scientists look to nature to solve all kinds of human problems. In the process, they hope to make products better, cheaper and ecologically friendlier.