'Bulletproof Human Skin' Made From Spider Silk

[mick silver]

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/08/17/breakthrough-bulletproof-human-skin-made-from-spider-silk/?intcmp=obinsite

[chad]

it's bullet proof, only it can't stop a .22 round. what kind of bullets were they using? paint balls?

[Ares]

it's bullet proof, only it can't stop a .22 round. what kind of bullets were they using? paint balls?

Yeah I liked how they said it was a "success" because it stopped really low speed bullets. Try it on cadavers and if to does the same thing, then it wasn't a success.

The way it sounds they just invented a matrix for human skin cells to grow and attach themselves too. Definitely doesn't sound like body armor.

[mick silver]

some were on the old gim someone made a post about a company that made body armor and they said they were working on webs from spider

[iOWNme]

SpiderGoat Milk?

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/CuttingEdge/story?id=98095&page=1 - (Pre-2003)



It may be impossible to craft a silk purse from a sow's ear. But one day, it may be possible to fashion a silk bulletproof vest from, of all things, goat's milk.
For decades, scientists have been in awe of the lowly spider and the magical material it uses to spin its web. After all, strands of spider silk are a mere one-tenth the thickness of human hair, yet they can snag a bee traveling 20 miles per hour without breaking.

Ounce for ounce, spider silk is five times stronger than steel and about three times tougher than man-made fibers such as Kevlar. And that makes the material ideal for all sorts of interesting uses — from better, lighter bulletproof vests to safer suspension bridges.

But "harvesting" spider silk hasn't been easy. Unlike silkworms, spiders aren't easy to domesticate. "Spiders are territorial carnivores, they eat each other if placed in contact or in close proximity," says Jeffrey Turner, president and CEO of Nexia Biotechnoloies, Inc. "It's like trying to farm tigers."
Spider-less Silk

Now, researchers at the Quebec-based Nexia along with scientists at the U.S. Army's Soldier Biological Chemical Command (SBCCOM) in Natick, Mass., say they may have figured a way out of the sticky situation.

In the latest issue of Science, the researchers report that they've managed to successfully create artificial spider silk that's nearly as good as the real thing — and without involving a single spider.

How? Turner and his team of bio scientists took the genes responsible for creating spider silk into the cells of mammals, such as goats. Using those genes, the re-engineered goats were then able to produce in their milk the same protein that makes up spider's silk.

Turner says that by isolating those proteins from the goats' milk, they were then able to "spin" a thread remarkably similar to natural spider silk. "On things like toughness and modulus of elasticity — the ability to stretch without breaking — we're right on the money," says Turner.

Not Quite There Yet

Still, Turner does note there are still many other factors that need to be worked out before we see bridges built with man-made silk.

For one, the amount of silk-building protein that Nexia has been able to produce has been limited to a few strands. And it isn't clear yet how much protein may be able to be harvested in such a manner. Turner says his team expects to have a second research paper that would examine such details out by the end of this year.

And Nexia's experimental silk strands aren't an exact match — yet. Turner notes that they're only 20 percent to 40 percent as strong as natural spider silk.

"We still have more work to do," says Turner. "But to get this far is just a step forward."

Herd of Silky Goats?

And moving even further forward is what really excites Turner and his military partners.

The most promising aspect of their research so far: The spider genes are faithfully passed on among the experimental goats. And that means producing more artificial silk might be as simple as breeding more of the genetically-enhanced goats naturally.

Since starting the experiment three years ago, Turner says Nexia's flock in Montreal has grown to nearly 50 goats. Within the next several years he expects the flock to scale up to "several thousand."

And as the company continues its research and grows out the herd, Turner believes that it won't be long before we could see commercial applications. Nexia has already plans to market the material, dubbed BioSteel, for use as fine suture material and biodegradable fishing line by 2003 or 2004.

If all goes well by then, he says it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to see lightweight body armor made of artificial spider silk within three to five more years.


http://resources1.news.com.au/images/2010/05/17/1225867/619153-spider-goat.jpg

[iOWNme]

(This article is from 2002)


Nexia and US Army spin the world’s first man-made spider silk performance fibers


http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-01/nbi-nau011102.php



Montreal, Québec, Canada, and Natick, Massachusetts, January 17, 2002 - Nexia Biotechnologies Inc. (TSE:NXB) and the U.S. Army Soldier Biological Chemical Command (SBCCOM) have reported in this week’s journal of Science that they have made the world’s first spider silk fibers from man-made materials with properties similar to natural spider silk. Spider silk has long been admired by material scientists for its unique combination of high-performance properties including toughness, strength, light-ness and biodegradability. Nexia is developing recombinant spider silk, trade named BioSteel®, for applications in the medical, military and industrial performance fiber markets. "Mimicking spider silk properties has been the holy grail of material science for a long time and now we’ve been able to make useful fibers," said Jeffrey Turner, PhD, President and CEO of Nexia.

"Having achieved this proof of principle, Nexia has now moved toward commercial development for multiple applications such as medical sutures, biodegradable fishing lines, soft body armor and unique material composites. Our strategy is two-fold: to produce large quantities of BioSteel® through our proprietary transgenic goat technology and to optimize spinning processes to create a diversity of spider silks with specific properties."

The Science paper, titled "Spider Silk Fibers Spun from Soluble Recombinant Silk Produced in Mammalian Cells" (Lazaris et al., 2002-01-18. Science. Vol. 295:472-476) describes the production of a number of different dragline spider silk proteins via cell culture techniques using silk genes derived from two different species of orb-weaving spiders. The dragline spider silks from these species have been documented to be among the strongest silks reported. The monomer silk proteins from one of these species were spun from an aqueous solution to produce water-insoluble BioSteel® fibers. These fibers were tested for a number of mechanical properties and compared to natural spider silk. The researchers found that the spinning conditions used were adequate to produce fibers with mechanical properties similar to natural dragline spider silk including toughness and modulus, but had lower strength (tenacity) than natural spider silk. Toughness measures the amount of energy that the fibers can absorb before breaking and spider silks are among the toughest materials in the world. In effect, initial fibers of BioSteel® were able to absorb similar amounts of energy as natural spider silk by stretching farther. The fibers also had good water stability, orientation and were uniform in diameter.

"We believe the Science paper will be seen as a landmark article in spinning water stable fibers with good mechanical properties using an aqueous process," said Jean Herbert, Leader, Materials Science Team at SBCCOM’s Natick Soldier Center. "We and others have been working on spider silk for con-siderable time and are thrilled finally to have the opportunity to spin synthetic silks and move the field towards real applications. The availability of Nexia’s water-soluble recombinant silk proteins has been a fundamental breakthrough in our ability to spin spider silk fibers."

http://www.eurekalert.org/images/release_graphics/Spider_Silk.gif

Scientists at the Natick facility are well-known for their expertise in high-performance fiber application development and their deployment of superior military, and often civilian, systems. The Natick Soldier Center has been working with Nexia under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) since May 1999 and the results are reported jointly in the Science paper. "These results are remarkable," said Costas N. Karatzas, PhD, Vice-President, Research & Development at Nexia. "First, we were able to produce monomers and spin fibers in an aqueous environment thereby mimicking the spider’s way of spinning silk, a process that has been perfected through 400 million years of evolution. Using these water-based BioSteel® solutions for large-scale fiber spinning would be con-siderably more environmentally friendly than using harsh solvents such as those used for most synthetic fiber manufacturing.

"Second, the material from mammalian cells was spun into fibers with significant toughness. Scientists have been successful in producing spider silk proteins in bacteria and yeast in the past, but for a number of reasons, have been unable to spin fibers with appreciable properties. Now with the availability of mammalian-derived BioSteel® fibers, we can begin to optimize the spinning process in order to tailor BioSteel® properties for a wide range of applications. We are grateful to the US Army team at Natick and our other collaborators for their expert guidance in this project," added Dr. Karatzas.

Dragline silk, which comprises the radiating spokes of a spider web, exhibits a combination of strength and toughness unmatched by high-performance synthetic fibers. Dragline silk is three times tougher than aramid fibers and five times as strong, by weight, as steel. Dragline silk is composed of proteins with multiple repetitive sequence blocks that impart its mechanical properties. Spiders can be coaxed to make silk, but attempts to create "spider farms" have failed because of the territorial nature of spiders.

BioSteel® is eco-friendly both in terms of its composition and its production process. As opposed to most other synthetic fibers, BioSteel® is expected to be biodegradable over time in the presence of water making it a promising material for such applications as medical sutures and fishing lines. Additionally, the aqueous production process has the potential to be non-polluting and environmentally friendly in contrast to the manufacturing of other synthetic fibers.

"It’s incredible that a tiny animal found literally in your backyard can create such an amazing material by using only amino acids, the same building blocks that are used to make skin and hair," added Dr. Turner. "Spider silk is a material science wonder – a self-assembling, biodegradable, high-performance, nanofiber structure one-tenth the width of a human hair that can stop a bee traveling at 20 miles per hour without breaking. Spider silk has dwarfed Man’s achievements in material science to date."

Nexia has exclusive, worldwide rights to broad patents covering spider silks genes and proteins and is in the process of developing commercial quantities of spider silk using its proprietary transgenic goat technology. Nexia has developed a number of male and female BioSteel® founder goats. Males are being used to expand the herd and females will begin producing milk in the second quarter 2002 to provide increasing quantities of BioSteel® for spinning process optimization, product development and commer-cialization.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioSteel - BioSteel

http://pruned.blogspot.com/2009/09/postnatural-organism-of-month.html


http://forum.davidicke.com/showthread.php?t=116722 - some info in this David Icke forum thread. Worth the read or bookmark for later.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-tech/meet-spider-goat-the-dna-enhanced-web-flinging-nanny-that-may-one-day-knit-your-bones/story-fn5fsgyc-1225867617374?from=public_rss

[JDRock]

...im going to throw up....

[horseshoe3]

Even if they get it to the point where it will stop a bullet, it will still do great damage. Bad contusions at the least, broken bones and ruptured internal organs more likely. There has to be some structure to spread out the force and lowere the pressure.

I haven't done a lot of research on the subject, but it looks like Dragonskin offers a great combination of flexibility and protection.

[ximmy]

Sell them to the Army... they will buy anything... (that doesn't work) [good stuff is sent to Israel].
----
The U.S. Army didn’t bother to properly test five million body armor plates that were supposed to protect soldiers on the battlefield. In some cases, certain tests of the live-saving gear were ignored altogether.

That’s according to a new report from the Defense Department Inspector General, which found that the Army office in charge of insuring the armor’s quality essentially fell asleep at the switch. Inserts were tested improperly and in some cases not at all. The testing flubs don’t prove that all five million plates are defective, but they deprive the Army of information about the reliability of a lot of equipment needed to protect troops in the field.

“The Army cannot be sure that the appropriate level of protection has been achieved,” the report says. Now, it’ll go back and retest the vests, some of which were bought as long as seven years ago....

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/08/fubar-army-blew-tests-on-5-million-body-armor-plates/