I think I remember hearing something about this.. pretty neat.. much better 'n waiting around for caterpillars and spiders to squirt out enough of the crap to be harvested.. you could have a whole heard of silk goats eating up a hillside worth of grasses and bring in a month's supply worth of silk every morning..
What's a kevlar vest for? Like a bullet-proof vest or something else?
I have heard they spliced Founder Dna with tomato Dna, to get a Tomato that would not be killed off in the winter time.
I always thought it was an urban myth. But I just went and searched it and found an article.
quote:
Consumers have no idea how much science is changing our food, says Andrew Kimbrell, a lawyer for consumer advocate group The Center for Food Safety. "You're taking a gene from a foreign species - let's take a flounder gene, for example - and putting it into a tomato," he says. "This has actually happened."
"They want that tomato to grow at lower temperatures, and they want to be able to store it at freezing for a much longer time than they currently can," he explains.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture approved a field test to grow the tomatoes with the experimental gene "based on one identified in the winter flounder." The idea: The gene that keeps flounders from freezing in cold water would also keep0 the tomato fresh in freezing weather. The tomatoes were grown but never sold. Still, Kimbrell says the experiment shows that food is changing in unexpected ways.
"We're able to, though this technology, mix and match the genetic code of the entire living kingdom at will. We never had this power before," he says.
There's another recent story about Israeli scientists coming up with some sort of engineered virus that stimulates arachnid cells responsible for the generation of silk into high volume production. They intend to use this technique to basically mass produce "natual silk fibres" which of course can be used for all the applications described above. Strange stuff, can't remember where I read it though. Perhaps elsewhere here on the site...
01-13-2003 09:35 PM
