Ologies with Alie Ward - Spidroinology (SPIDERWEBS) with Randy Lewis

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

Invisible but stronger than steel. Complex architectural marvels. Things that stick to your face. Spiderwebs are much more than just Halloween decor or something to feather dust from your corners. Spider silk expert Dr. Randy Lewis of Utah State University not only coined the word "spidroin" for the proteins comprising the many types of silk, but he is considered one of the foremost experts on the wonders of spiderwebs. Alie visits his lab and chats about how spiders weave them, what the silk is made of, the street value of a spool, future applications of spider silk, transgenic experimentation, best spider movies, worst spider myths and why he deserves an ice cream cake. You'll never (not) see a spiderweb the same. A donation went to the Women's Empowerment and Entrepreneurship WorkshopSponsor links: periodbetter.com, code OLOGIES; TakeCareOf.com code OLOGIES50; thegreatcoursesplus.com/OLOGIES; calm.com/ologiesMore links up at alieward.com/ologies/spidroinologyBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and STIIIICKERS!Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologiesFollow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWardSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's that bottle of mustard. You don't even remember buying, but you've moved with twice now. Alleyward. Back with another episode of Allergies. Okay, I just want to say, if you're listening, you're not a huge fan of spiders, I want to tell you that you're brave, I'm proud of you. And spoiler alert, this is not scary at all. We barely even talk about spiders themselves, but rather we just kind of focus on things

that come out of their rears. So for anyone in your life who's a spiderfobe, just gently maybe send them this episode. Tell them it's a great way to admire the critters and there are very few goosebumps in the road ahead. So one day we're going to work up to arachnology. We're going to talk about the animals themselves one day, but today is not that day, my friends. So today we're just walking into spiderwebs. But before that, a quick detour into Thank You Shire.

So thank you to everyone supporting the show on Patreon. You submit questions for theologists each week, a dollar a month gets you in that club. Just go to patreon.com.com. And it lets me pay my editors well and donate to four or five charities each month while still getting to be choosy about who sponsors the show. So thanks to everyone also wearing Allergies merch from olergiesmerch.com. Thanks to everyone who has made sure that you're subscribed, especially with the recent iOS updates.

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Okay, spideronology. What in the dark shadowy night is that? So unless you are a spider doctor, you probably did not know that there is a word for spider webs and it's spidroins. Well, spidroins are the main proteins in spider silk and they're as strong as steel, but they're more flexible and they're similar to collagen or keratin. We're going to get into it. So yes, kiddos, this is a whole episode on unraveling the mysteries and looking into the

future of spider silk. And it is how it works, how it may change all of our lives. So I met thisologist when I went to Utah State University to film a segment in his lab for Innovation Nation, which is my wonderful dream job slash day job as a correspondent for CBS for them Saturday mornings. Check your local listings along with my other own show on the CW Did I Mention Invention? Did I mention that I have a show called Did I Mention Invention? Okay, so you can find those on weekends, CWCBS.

Anyway, it was a very beautiful April afternoon. And after we finished filming his segment, I coerced him into sitting down for a podcast chat and he is a world famous pioneer in spider silk. So stick around to get a lifetime's worth of appreciation and context about what a spider web is, what it's made of, how strong a single thread can be, how it's synthesized in labs, future medical uses, some superhero flim flam, transgenic goats, gene splicing, bow ties, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and what too much coffee does to spider brains with Utah State biology professor and your new favorite spidroinologist, Dr. Randy Lewis.

Cool beans. So if you could tell me your first and last name and how you pronounce it. Okay. Randy Lewis. Dr. Randy Lewis. Dr. Randy Lewis. And if you are an oligist of any sort, what do you think you would be? Probably a biomaterial oligist.

Okay. Or you deal with spidroins. Spidroin. It could be a spidroin oligist, but most people would know what that was. So biomaterials might be a broader thing for people to know what I really am. Well, they're about to know what a spidroinologist is. True enough. True enough.

Of the people in the world who work with spider silk. Is it a small group? It's a relatively small group. I would say that the entire publication record probably involves no more than 30 labs. There might be a few more than that. And of those, probably only 20 of them have ever published more than one paper. How many papers have you published? My total is like 150 and on spider silk, we're probably talking 70.

Oh my gosh, what about patents? So we have 11 patents right now. We have three that are pending. My lord. So how long have you been in the spider silk, spy drion game? Yeah, just call it spider silk works because nobody uses the spider in term that we came up with to describe the proteins. I keep wanting to say spidrion, but it's spidroin like it rhymes with groin, which is I guess

where the silk comes from on your body if you're a spider. I believe I should be considered the father of spider silk, at least at the molecular level, although I've now passed enough generations that some are calling me the grandfather of it. Hi grandpa. But we cloned the first spider silk gene 30 years ago this coming summer. 30 years ago this coming summer? 30 years.

Do you remember the date? No, I don't. You got to have a cake or something. Get a sheet cake from Costco. That's probably true. We probably ought to celebrate somehow at least. So ice cream cake from the ice cream store, probably better for my grouping. Get a carvel.

You deserve it. Yeah, that's all right. We don't have them around here. Now, tell me a little bit about your backstory before we go into how you started cloning the proteins of spider silk. What was your backstory? So I was born and raised in Northern Wyoming. I went to Caltech as an undergrad.

I'm a two-time inductee into the Caltech Athletic Hall of Fame. Really? Because I was the captain of the first wrestling team ever to win a conference championship and we actually won three in a row. I didn't even know that they had a wrestling team. Well they don't anymore. They did then. So there are no academic marks for my history at Caltech, but there are wrestling marks.

So go to a brain school and be a non-brain is the way to go. I then went to grad school at UC San Diego, did a postdoc at the Rosh Institute. So Randy did his undergrad in chemistry and his master's and PhD in biochem, then did postdoc in molecular biology. So notice zero of those degrees were in entomology or arachnology. So how did you get all tangled up in these spider webs? I started on the spider silk sort of as a side light and it became the dominant thing that we did in the lab.

Your side hustle took over. It's true. Absolutely true. Did you have a thing for spiders before that? I don't think that I had a thing for them. I think that I recognized spiders as being interesting organisms and knew some about them, but clearly not nearly as much as I've learned since then to appreciate just what an amazing organism they are.

And so where did you start in the field? What was your first intro into spider silk? So I was working with a company out in California, a small biotech company, and they had developed technique for a vaccine. So what they were wanting to do was to make silkworm silk and it became clear that economically that never made any sense. So they asked me to look at spider silk and I did and at the time there was a lot of known about the biology, but absolutely nothing about the actual fibers themselves except

that they were made out of protein and proteins were what my lab was good at. So they decided that it was too long-term a project, which turns out to be true obviously because 30 years later we still really don't have any products out there. So as a biotech company, you know, you'd gone belly up a long time ago. So I was able to talk to the Office of Naval Research, which they had contacted about their vaccine stuff, and produced a fairly small little proposal to them to see if we couldn't clone the gene for protein that made up one of the spider silks. And I ended up getting the grant, but it's interesting because it got two reviews from

the outside, one of which said this was the best thing, they could be the best things since sliced bread. The other one said this is the stupidest idea I ever heard of. Fortunately the program officer chose to take the first one and give me money. Fortunately in the first year we were able to clone and sequence the very first spider silk gene. In the first year? First year.

We got it done before a year was up, son. Man, I've been meaning to reorganize my kitchen cabinets for at least two years and you cloned a gene in a year. Yeah, well at a certain stage it's the people you have that's not you that accomplish something. And I'm at the stage where, you know, I know how to solve problems, but I don't know how to do most of the things in the lab anymore. Okay, before we get to into how this golden fleece unicorn hair, heaven tinsel, unobtainium is obtained, let's get down to some brassy tacks.

Walk me through a little bit about what is spider silk because I know enough about a spider butt to know that different things comes out of their silk glands. Yes, yes. What's going on? So the spiders that we work with make six different kinds of silk and a glue. They're the ones that make the typical round web. It's called an orb web that most people think about that spiders make. Okay, side note.

If you're wondering what invisible force has captured your face, what gossamer, thready creation has veiled you at night, those are likely the work of orb weaver spiders. They are architects and artisans. They are craft spiders. Their talent is innate and their spiral spider webs are just iconic. Now some like the Nephila golden orb weavers spin this brilliant yellow silk. It just glimmers. It's like threads of gold.

So what's up with cobwebs? Well, spider web tends to mean one that is still inhabited and cobwebs refer to old abandoned ones. So once they get dusty, they tend to lose their tack. But a cobweb is also a type of web, one that's less of a two-plained spiral net, more of a three-dimensional maze. We'll get into that in a bit. And they use the silks for very different purposes and they have very different mechanical

properties. So, you know, evolutionarily, you sort of have a lot of evolutionary tinkering that went on before we ever got to take a look at it. So basically, in most of the glands, there's a couple of them that they don't produce silk all the time. But generally, they produce silk, put it in a gland, they have it in a form that's still not completely identified. But we think they're sort of very small little balls of protein that are present in there

and micelles. But protein micelles, as opposed to membrane micelles, which is what most people think about. When he says micelles, he's not talking about his own cells, but rather little gatherings of proteins hanging out in a huddle that are called micelles. Then when they pull the silk out, so they pull it out like floss, they don't squeeze it out like toothpaste. So all of the silks have to be pulled out. And when they pull that, the silk at the very end of a tube going down from the gland that

they make it to the outside, all the silk then behind it starts to get pulled out because it's very viscous. On the trip down that tube, the shear forces cause the protein molecules to basically line up. If you were to take spaghetti, start getting it down through a funnel, all the spaghetti molecule, the spaghetti has to line up or it doesn't go down. So that's what's happening in this trip down there. When they do that, they actually protein molecules lock together and become insoluble.

And that's how the fiber forms. Amazingly enough, it can happen in as little as 10 milliseconds. So if you see a spider fall, that silk is solidifying in milliseconds as it comes out of the spider. And do they use a combination of their spinnerettes or their legs or gravity? What gives it that force? All of the above. So they can't squeeze it out.

So they either have to pull it out with their leg. The other thing they can do is attach it to something and walk away from it. So the silk that most people are interested in called dragline silk. And it's dragline because when they walk away, they drag it behind them. So if you see a spider crawling across the ceiling, for instance, if you watch it, it will crawl from a ways and it will start wiggling its butt. But it can't stop twerking about it. When it does that, it's using another silk to attach the major silk to some kind of

a protrusion on the wall. So just like a climber, you know, if a climber climbs so far, then they put a piton or a hook or something in there. It's exactly what spiders have been doing for 400 million years. So rock climbers are a little behind on that. And in addition, they can stick the silk to almost anything. Now they have trouble with something like Teflon, but they can stick it to glass wonderfully. So you know, you put them in a glass aquarium, for instance, or a plexiglass aquarium, and

you can see them, you can see the little attachments where they put all their silk down. That is how they produce the silk and have to pull it out. And what are some other types of silk? Because you said six. So that's the... So they have dragline silk that's the framework of the web and they use it for their protective line. So the minor ampulate silk that they use, it's mostly for reinforcing of the web.

There is a tubular form silk and that's almost crystalline. So the silk is relatively strong, but if you try to bend it, it'll break easily. They use that for an outer coating when they lay their eggs. There's an assiniform silk that they use to both wrap their prey and wrap their eggs. So that's the inside case of an egg layer. They have aggregate silk, which is the silk and is the glue in there. Pure form is the attachment. So they use that to attach their silks down.

And then there's flagella form silk, critically important, because that's most of the spiral in the web. And that's what they use to catch their prey with. So it's very stretchy. So basically, insect hits it, just stretches the silk out until all the energy is absorbed and then it gets stuck in the glue. So it's a boyoyo-yoyang silk. Well, not so much.

Yeah, I was not right about that. So the key is you don't want to trample it. So what happens is it absorbs that energy and then radiates it back as heat. So if you look at it, it hits the web. So the web doing this, the web comes back very slowly and loses like 75% of all that energy as heat on that retraction back up very slowly. Wow. So it doesn't just take the prey and then shoot the prey.

That would not be very efficient. You know, it looked cute, but it would not do the spiral. You know, for the spider's lifetime, it would not be very efficient, so you'd lose a lot of your prey. Okay. So real quick, they've got major amputate or dragline silk, one that is just super strong. It's as strong as steel, but it's tougher and it acts as those webs, spokes and the

non-sticky outer rim. And then there's minor amputate, which is temporary, kind of like a sketch while they're building the web, then they have flagella form, sticky silk for the inside spiral of the web, that little bullseye, super sticky. And then tubula form silk is stiff egg sack business. There's acidiform, which is the saran wrapy sheet that they mummy their prey with. It's two to three times as strong as that first dragline silk. And then there's also aggregate, which is hardcore glue silk.

And they're produced by four to six hairy nubbins on their undercarriage called spinnerets. And those each have a bunch of nozzles, kind of like froyo dispensers. And then they're stretched out and it's extruded from the glands from the spinnerets. Does it look like a glove slowly waving at you, palpating some goo? Yes, it does. But let's get back to the silk itself. And how different from a molecular structure are these six different types of silk? So they, all of them have what I call a Lego sequence.

So those are sequences that naturally when they make a fiber interdigitate. So they literally have holes and pins just like Legos do. So most of the silks have some form of Lego. Now it turns out some of them have longer pins, some of them have bigger holes, some of them have, you know, some variations, but all of them have something that allows them to stick together to make a fiber. Then the ones that have stretch have in there something that looks like a slinky, you know, at a nano scale.

And so when it stretches and you let go, it retracts. Now as we said, the difference is that it doesn't retract as fast as you stretched it. So in that retraction, it loses heat. And so, you know, it keeps from basically serving as a trampoline. What's unique is that there are not variations in those proteins between different species of spiders. So if you look at all of the orb weavers, the individual six proteins and the glue protein, all look very, very similar in each species compared to each other species.

Now they look very different from each other, but not from the same silk in a different species. They can be separated for as much as 150 million years. And still, the silks, you would recognize it. I mean, somebody who's in the field would recognize instantly looking at that sequence, which silk it was from any of those. I mean, there's probably a handful of you on earth that could probably look at that and say, oh, I know what that is.

I would hope there's more than that now, at least, you know, my students should all know that. That's a good point. But yeah, I mean, it's certainly a limited one, but they're really easily recognizable. And how are the spiders determining, okay, I know I need a dragon. I'm blind here to make the framework of my night. I know I need something sticky. Any idea?

It's all genetically programmed. It's absolutely clear. I mean, they have no brain in the sense of being able to make that decision. And so, you know, they are hardwired. This silk does this. This silk does this. This silk does this. So, you know, in some cases we can collect the silks from the spider directly, but most

of the time it's difficult. For instance, they know that they want to use the prey wrapping silk when they have prey. So, it turns out if you can find just the right frequency on the spider, then they'll believe that they have something to wrap and they'll start putting that silk out, so you can catch that. But most of them, you know, major and minor relatively easy, the rest of them are almost impossible to collect because you can't provide the right stimulus to get the right

silk. You just don't have the right trigger to tell it to do it. It's true. A web can act like a harp and spiders here with tiny slits in their feet, totally normal, and threw little hairs all over their body. And I got ensnared, reading a paper titled, Micro and Nano Structural Details of a Spider's Filter for Substrate Vibrations Relevance for Low Frequency Signal Transmission. But again, back to the web.

You can buy a tiny spool of the Golden Silk on Etsy for $200 a gram, and I Googled it, and that was way more expensive than street drugs. So with this smarkas board of silks, some have to be stronger and cooler than others, right? Like some have to be better. And now, which spider has the best silk? You know, I think that's a tough question. There is a bark spider from South America that is argued to have the strongest silk.

Now, it's strongest in the combination of stretch and strength, because it stretches lots more than most spider silks do, not because it's necessarily strong. The variations in the silk, even with an individual spider, are fairly large because they don't do a good job of controlling the diameter. Really? Whenever you measure strength, you measure it based on cross-sectional area. So obviously, if something's fatter, then it's going to be stronger than something that's thinner.

Just a side note, think of a braid versus a hair, or a rope versus a thread, or one string of the cheese versus the whole string cheese. I'm so hungry. So, you know, when you say which spider has the best, I think it's which silk is the best, and that's clearly drag line. It's got the best combination of strength and elasticity to give you that unique combination that no man-made material can beat. Is drag line silk the one where you're walking into the backyard at night and you get a web

on your face and you feel like you're going to die? Well, I don't know about the last part of that statement, but certainly it's actually the combination of all of them, because the web has four different silks in it. Okay. Major, minor, it has the glue, and it has the crapture spill. So when you hit that, I think it's probably more the fact that it adheres to your face because of the glue, and it also stretches enough. So you know, you can sort of feel that your face is going into it.

When it finally breaks, it's already now sort of attached all over there and stretched tight. Does that ever happen to you when you go, oh, good one, guys? Not very often. Okay. In the Rocky Mountains, most of the webs are relatively well concealed, whereas in places like down south, they stick them out anywhere because they have a much higher opportunity here.

In the Rockies, most of them are where there's some light shining or something like that, or in a dark place in a barn. So it has happened occasionally in a barn where you just can't see them until it's too late. The ones that feel like very fine fishing line where you can almost feel it snap, that was stronger than I expected it. Yeah. And who did I just wake up?

Right. It's another thing. Even though I love spiders, I'm like, I definitely don't want to ruin your home. Right. I don't want to be like Hurricane Alley. Yeah. Just coming through. PS, one of the most beautiful things I have ever laid my actual eyes on is this 11-by-4-foot

tapestry woven from golden or weaver silk. It was on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 2009, and it was the first stop I made in New York when I went then. And it looks kind of like a table runner, but made out of sunlight or like a bedspread woven from an angel's laugh. It also looked expensive and took several years of milking wild Malagasy spiders to make. It was not casual.

And now, what are some applications of spider silk? I know the only thing that I'm familiar with that I think of that comes to mind is this tapestry that was woven on a golden or weaver silk that's been on display. I mentioned it to you earlier, and you said that it makes you kind of sad. Yeah. Because clearly, it was done by hand by women in Madagascar, and it's obvious they were not paid a lot of money for the amount of work they had to do. So I think it's an amazing accomplishment.

It is without a doubt the largest amount of spider silk that's ever been used for any purpose whatsoever. Yeah. And you know, the women had to collect the silk from the spider, and then they had to weave it into the tapestry and that kind of stuff. So it's amazing. It's just, you know, I feel like the people over there may have been, I mean, maybe they had no jobs in a dollar a day or whatever they got paid was still better than nothing,

and maybe it was. Mm-hmm. It's a huge amount of manpower for something that's wonderful to look at an art object, but beyond that, I'm not sure you couldn't have made something, you know, attempt that size and still been an impressive accomplishment in terms of that. Right. So. I hadn't considered this, and it's a great point.

The two men who made the tapestry were from Europe and America, and they were hiring locals, and with 3,000 giant spiders harvested, milked, and returned to the wild daily, over a course of four years, a budget of a half a million dollars is pretty low for that amount of toil. And it rightfully dims the glow of the original work for me. But it also shines a light on why Randy's work understanding and figuring out more affordable ways to harvest this material is so important. He's not looking to fabricate a cape so that an alabaster supermodel can strut in it for a few minutes before it's returned to a lockbox.

And the work that you're doing with Spidey Tech, what types of materials do you think that you'll be getting to fabricate? And how will that kind of change the way that we live potentially, hopefully? Yeah. Fingers crossed. All arms crossed. Yeah, right. So I think that what most people are not very aware of is that we've been able to develop

uses other than just fibers, and I think everybody when you think about spiders, so if you think about clothing, you think about bulletproof vests, you think about climbing ropes, think about lots of things along those lines. But on the fiber end, in addition, we think there's a real opportunity for composite materials, especially something like epoxy-based composite materials. That comes from two reasons. One is you need combination of stretch and strength. And there's no other materials out there that you could use for reinforcing to do that.

So a composite epoxy material is usually made of, say, glass strands or carbon fibers embedded in a glue or a resin. So picture something made out of fiberglass, and then imagine an upgrade to spider-dryne. The second is that we found that spider silk can be made into an amazing adhesive. Well, we know ours adheres to plastic, it adheres to metal, it adheres to wood. I mean, there's almost nothing that we can't coat, using it as thin films, using it for coatings. There's almost nothing we can't coat.

And part of the coating idea is that we can put additives in there. So for instance, coating catheters, we can put antimicrobials and antifouling factors so that you don't get infections when you implant a catheter and they don't plug up at the end, which happens to a pretty amazingly high percentage of catheters that get implanted in hospitals. And I think everything from medical to there's clearly interest in the defense department and lots of things in between. It seems absolutely unreal that it can be as strong as steel, but a lot lighter?

Sure. It's because it's got a combination of strength and stretch. And that's really what makes it unique, I think. Side note, if you've never had a catheter, but just Googled one to get an idea of how they work, wow. Boy, howdy, hot damn. I would like that to not get infected, please. So thanks, spiders.

And also, like we heard in the Bones episode of Osteology, strength and flexibility is what make things work the best. So let spiders inspire you. It's okay to stand up for yourself and be strong, but maybe have some wiggle room or compromise when called for. So we might have cars that have a chassis made out of spider silk and panels that are made out of spider silk? Right.

And again, they'll be composite materials. But you can imagine if you design it right, that maybe you don't get a ding the next time somebody taps your bumper because you've got something that flexes and comes back again. Right. They're just going to bend and pop right back out again. Thanks, spiders. Exactly. What is your relationship to spiders?

I don't hate spiders. I love them. You know, I guess I've always had some admiration, but certainly, you know, since we started this work, it's hard not to be incredibly admiring about their success. I mean, recognizing that, you know, you find them in the dead of the rainforest, you find them in the middle of the desert, every place, but Antarctica and they were there before it got too cold for anything to survive. The fact that they have such a wide variation in prey, they have such a wide variation in

capture strategies. It's pretty impressive to realize just how successful they are as an organism. Do you get a lot of spider gifts? I see that you have some knickknacks. I got quite a few in my office and I gathered most of them here. Some of them I've actually gotten, some of them have been given to me. It's hard not to. It's true.

He had a fair amount of tasteful spider knickknackery on the windowsill and we took a picture each holding a woven spider. They were not in a glass case, nor did they break anyone's bank. They were just made out of wire, probably cotton threads. When it comes to, well, when it comes to the future of spider silk, how far off is it? I mean, are we talking like in maybe 20 years, I'll get to wear a spider vest? I think the answer is no and I think the fiber end is going to come faster than we initially thought because we can use the transgenic silkworms to make fibers now that are best

fibers from the transgenic silkworms are as good as spider silk. In some ways, you might even argue a little better, but certainly as good as native dragline silk. That means that we have a relatively easy manufacturing process to be able to make large amounts of that. Walk me through how you have managed to take spider silk and have it made in the lab and made through other organisms instead of having to hand spool a Nephila spider and Madagascar. How are you doing it?

Right. As part of the first week we did, I identified the genes that the spiders used to make spider silk protein. Then what we do is take that gene and usually we make a synthetic copy because the use of certain codons in the DNA is species dependent. For instance, the spiders use certain ones and E. coli bacteria uses different ones. We try to do is match up, we make the same protein sequence, we just make it with different sequence of DNA so that it matches better with what the organism uses.

Then we just take that gene and pop it into the organism we're looking at. Sit the hell down because this is bananas and it may inspire this year's Halloween costume. Just a decade ago, Randy and a research team were able to splice spider silk making genes into goats and the goats then produced liquid spider silk in their milk and Randy was able to filter out the silk and then stretch it to the right consistency using machinery. While he got to hold a lot of baby goats and pet baby goats on the head and essentially be a wizardy science shepherd of transgenic spider goats, there was a lot of milk being tossed.

Then they spliced the spider silk gene into the DNA of silkworm moths and rather than standard silk, those caterpillars now spun this highly durable and really prized spider silk with much less waste. When I visited his lab, there were trays of chunky caterpillars just munching, munching, munching on ground mulberry pellets and there were also other trays filled with soft egg-looking cocoons that would be boiled and spooled. With the silkworms, we were one because technology advanced significantly further, we were able to actually cut and splice in our gene in exactly the same spot as the gene was for

the silkworm silk protein. So now everything there is exactly the same as it was except there's a different protein being made instead of the silkworm protein is making the spider silk protein and it proceeds to just put it right into the cocoon as if it were its own silk. And when you're saying you just pop the code in, I have a feeling it's a little bit more complicated than that. How does one do transgenic, like recoding like that? So in the random ones, there are lots of DNA out there that allows you to randomly insert

something into a chromosome and so it just randomly goes in. The new CRISPR-Cas9 system allows you to very precisely make two cuts and then you now have a gap in the DNA and the cells use two methods, one of which is very precise but very low frequency. It does another one that's very imprecise but much higher frequency and we went with both and the only one that worked was imprecise and large amounts. So it meant that we could put it in. We didn't have to be exact.

If you do the other way, you got to be exact because it's going to fit it right where it's supposed to be. This one, you got some slop in exactly where it goes but it still goes in the same site that we cut out which was in this case the silkworm silk protein gene. And what did you start with? Did you start by putting these genes into E. coli and then did you move up to goats and then alfalfa and then silk? Yes.

What was the order? With bacteria just because they're easy. We can come up with a new gene. We can pop it in E. coli and get protein in three to four months. We then went to the goats and we worked with a company in Canada who had already developed a technology to get it into the goat's milk so that we were able to take their technology and our technology, put them together and end up with the spider goats. Peanut butter chocolate, Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, these pairings have nothing on

spider goats. Now, what if you're too vegan for all this business? Is outsourcing, spy drawing, limited to goats and caterpillars? Nope. They're also working on cramming the gene into and harvesting silk from alfalfa. What? We then sort of, we started on alfalfa and then, you know, more recently in the last couple of years we've moved on to the silkworm, particularly precision.

We did silkworms before, what now, almost eight or nine years ago we did, but we did it very imprecisely. And so the problem was is that when you bred those worms, a lot of times they'd lose that gene because it wasn't in the identical place that they expected it to be. So now we've got it in right where it should be and we've done five, four generations and it behaves just exactly like it's expected to be, meaning it gets carried on to the next generation at a certain frequency, which is exactly what you'd expect to have happen. And let's say you're working with E. coli.

You are getting the protein in a liquid form and then extruding that, or can you walk me through really briefly, like with each of those different organisms, how you're harvesting it? Right. So with both, with alfalfa, with the goats, with the bacteria, process is the same. We have to isolate the spider silk protein. And although it's slightly different technology that you use, bottom line is you have to end up with pure protein as a protein for when you have the pure protein, then we've developed

a technology that allows it to dissolve it in water. And that's a huge advance because previous to that and still a large number of people working in the field dissolve it in some pretty nasty materials. And the other thing is that they're all costly. So you can't imagine that as a real step forward in manufacturing process. So being able to dissolve it in water is a big step forward. When we, you know, we can spend fibers out of that, we can use it for coatings. We can use it as an adhesive.

All of those things fall out of having it in water. The silkworm makes fibers for us. And so, you know, literally we use the standard, standard technology for unwrapping cocoons, washing the silk and wrapping it onto a spool. P.S. How is silk spun? Well, I watched a video put out by How It's Made and they had this to say. It's hard to believe this beautiful fabric comes from worms.

The female silkworm lays up to 400 eggs in one shot, then promptly dies. Okay. How it's made? It's not really a worm. And also a lady silkmouth has like a tragic flightless life and then her babies are boiled so that the cocoon doesn't break and the threads, which can be nearly a kilometer long, stay in one continuous form. So 50 or so cocoons are unraveled.

They're spun into one thread. It's labor intensive. So if you see a guy who has ever tossed his tie over a shoulder because he's eating chili, you can be like, I get it. A lot of non-worms lost their lives for that tie. When you think about ramping it up to a more, say, commercial level, what do you think is going to be the avenue that you're going to go down? Do you think it's going to be the pure fiber from silkworms or do you think the alfalfa

has the best yield? So I certainly believe ultimately alfalfa is going to be the way to go to make protein. The problem with silkworms is the only thing you're going to do is get fibers. Trying to dissolve that silk is an incredible losing proposition. It's not the way to get spider silk protein. So spider silk protein is either going to be from one of the other three and hopefully we're going to advance the technology. So alfalfa will be the choice because certainly by all stretches, it looks like it's going

to be the least expensive process to go to. And then with byproduct, you were mentioned earlier that when you put this into goats and goat milk, that's great, but then you have some excess goat milk that you can't do much with. You can't necessarily take that to the farmer's market on a Sunday, transgenic spider goat milk. Yeah, not going to happen. Not going to happen.

That's one of the big advantages of alfalfa is that, you know, we'll take out two percent of the protein and the other 98 percent we can use for animal feed, use it as a protein supplement. Turns out that things like fish farms are struggling to get enough protein to expand. So we'd have protein that we'd be able to use there. You can also convert all of that waste into ethanol if you want to use that. So I think there are a number of routes that you could use for your waste from alfalfa that I actually will probably pay for the processing.

So spiderwebs, not just terrifying midnight face fails, they could also feed fish and keep lethal catheter funk away and make your car lighter and more efficient and maybe be transplanted into your own body. And what is something that in your career isolating this for the last 30 years and working with it that you were really looking forward to as a goal or as kind of a goal post? Yeah. I think it's still there and I think all of, you know, for the last at least 10 to 15 years, I think all of the people that have been working in my lab want to see a product come out.

And I think that's sort of at least a major goal is to say, you know, all the work that we've done has led to something that somebody can buy. I feel like you are at the forefront of it. If there's an expert in this, it's you in the world. Well, we've certainly been at it longer than anybody else and I think we've done more basic I would say without a doubt, we've done more basic science in terms of not only the proteins, but how the fibers are made and the three dimensional structure of the in the fibers and things like that.

I think we've done more than anybody else. You know, there are people who have niches, but I think we've covered the whole waterfront. Have you ever thought about just getting a silk tie made a bow tie for a special occasion? You know, it's not my style. So, you know, if it's going to be something, it'd be a golf shirt. So, you know, that's the direction I'd go as a golf shirt. So a spider silk golf shirt, a spider silk golf shirt. I got no idea.

There's no obvious reason why it would be an advantage. But, you know, at least you'd have a talking point when you're out playing. You'd have to get a big embroidered spider on the back, exactly. Front and back, front and back. Can I ask questions from listeners? Sure. Oh, my gosh. Listeners have questions. OK, before we get into your spider silk queries, a few words about sponsors of the show who

help make it possible to donate to a cause of the oligarchs choosing each week. And I realized this week that I forgot to ask Randy, so I rang him up on the horn. Just normcore as hell. And he answered at his desk. Phones, man, they're magic. And then he said he'd like the donation to go toward the Women's Empowerment and Entrepreneurship Project in Guatemala, which supports women-run farming initiatives to bring to market textiles, organic vegetables, and free-range chickens.

And this was through heifer.org. OK, now you may hear some words about some sponsors. Now, this first question was also asked by Amanda. Anna Thompson says there's a series of photos that go around every now and then of spider webs when they are on different drugs. Are these real images? And have we learned anything from giving spiders drugs? Do they just have a good time?

Like spiders are given cash? So the answer is that because the web spinning process is really genetically set, the drugs do mess it up. It turns out that the first paper was published in Scientific American in 1969. I was in the 60s, you know, a lot of drugs kicking around. And the answer is yes, that various drugs have substantial effects on sort of deranged might be too strong a word, but probably not inaccurate about what the webs look like when they're on various drugs.

Really? Yeah. This was indeed a study, and it was later replicated in the mid-1990s by NASA. So if you look up pictures, you'll see these scattered and kind of haphazard webs on uppers and caffeine. There are half-completed ones on hallucinogens, and let's just say some geometric minimalism done on sleeping pills. So according to researchers, each of the spiders interviewed during the process, thought their

web looked great and was hella tight. And then upon waking the next morning, a lot of spiders reported being embarrassed by their work. They thought it was a lot better when they were under the influence. That's not true. And to the best of my knowledge, there's no real correlation between what the drug was and what it did to disturb it, but it's probably because we don't know enough about the nervous system of a spider to actually be able to make an accurate judgment about what they're

doing on various kinds of drugs. I just looked at my phone, by the way, and I accidentally asked that question at 420, which is a... I'm not a big smoker, but I got to say that was good timing. Kimberly Fajardo wants to know, just how strong is spider silk? So the idea is that in terms of energy to break, which is the combination of stretch and strength, it's about four times stronger than Kevlar, 10 to 12 times stronger than steel. And it's important to remember that it's that combination of stretch and strength that makes

the spider silk unique. So there are no man-made materials. There are no other biological materials that have that kind of a combination. Yeah. Evelyn Jensen wants to know, does spider silk come in different colors? Interestingly enough, the answer is yes to a certain extent. So one of the spiders that we work with is called a golden orb weaver, and its silk is actually a gold color.

You mentioned the tapestry. If you see a picture of the tapestry, it's very gold colored. So very distinctive of the golden orb weavers. There's another spider, and by the way, nobody knows why it's gold. Nobody knows what the ... We actually spent a little time and got a little sidetrack trying to identify the dye or what it was. We never were successful in getting there. To the best of my knowledge, neither has anybody else.

There's another spider that makes sort of a greenish-hued silk, and then there's a whole family that make everything from sort of a brownish silk to a pinky silk, but they use it almost exclusively for their egg cases. So it's clearly to camouflage the egg case. So if you go out, you can find these because you don't see it in the drag line silk. You only see it when they make their egg case. So there's a pretty wide variety of colors that are out there, particularly for the egg cases.

So spiders are just out there using their stiffest silk to make little Easter eggs. Oh, and if you are an expectant parent and you're not sure what kind of nursery theme you want, consider camo. I mean, you won't be able to find the baby under all its grease paint and tiny mossy ghillie suit onesie, but also no bears will probably eat it. Spiders know what's up. Moving on, Deli Dames, Ashley Kelly, Caleb Patton, Canon Purdy, and first-time question asker, Laurence, all echoed Christina's question.

Christina Neal wants to know, how do you feel about Spider-Man? Is there even an ounce of truth to the idea that spider silk supporting the weight of a human being could be used or that it could be used in weaponry? So it turns out that that's a very interesting question and we have answered it. We got asked that question the first time from a children's program at the Canadian Broadcasting Company radio program, and they asked us, particularly, I guess, if Spider-Man 2 really stops the train and asks the question, could he really do it? So put the students to work on it, and the answer is yes, there's no question.

So we took it like the last speedometer reading was like 120 miles an hour, and we counted up how many cars there were and how big the engine. We got rough weights for those, so we were able to calculate how much energy was in that train, and then go back and look how many times did he stick the web onto the wall. The answer is he actually was about three times over having the ability to stop the train. That was kind of where we left it. Then we got another question, and somebody came up with, well, how much would he have to consume to make the, because it's all protein, right?

So it turns out we calculated that was about, had to eat about 85 pounds a steak a day. So we felt like yes, it was possible, but clearly practically it's unlikely that he could have managed to eat enough to make as much spider silk protein as he was able to shoot out. A scissor. P.S. in real life, it wouldn't shoot from his wrists though, because a more anatomically accurate spiderman would extrude silk from the slowly wriggling fingers right next to his anus.

Keeping that in mind, are you hungry? Who else asked about eating? Let's see, Brandon Butler wants to know, is it true that spiders can eat their silk and recycle it? The answer is yes, several species do that. Some of them do it actually on a daily basis, so it turns out to be very useful because initially when people are trying to understand something about the proteins, they would put radioactive amino acids on the web and then allow the spider to eat it.

What we've done is not used radioactive, but used amino acids that we can use for nuclear magnetic resonance studies for structure, and we put it in their water. And so when they drink the water, they recycle amino acids and it goes right into the silk. So the answer is yes, they do, and it's a very useful thing to do when you're studying the silk itself. Yeah, and I imagine then they can just kind of destroy and munch on their own web and rebuild it if it gets damaged, right? Yes, frequently they don't do that.

Usually when it's going to be repaired, they don't seem to clean up the old web, they just put a new one, you know, fill in that area with new silk. Oh, just imagine an HGTV show where you make a house, but your building materials come from your butt. And then when it kind of starts looking shabby, you just eat the whole house, make another butt house, it's rustic, it's resourceful, it's DIY, Y, Y, Y. Speaking of Y, some other folks shared this next question and they are Evan Jude, Amanda Baldeno, Casey, and Anna Thompson wants to know, related, why do some spiders string

webs across wide expanses like paths and trails and doorways instead of smaller areas? I imagine she has gotten a spider face on her. Yeah. And there's possibly two, depending on, one is that, again, they don't plan very well, they're not really intelligent about it, so they may start with some guidelines that are way out and then a web that's more in the middle, but also as they get larger, they need to make a bigger web just to catch more prey. So as they increase in size, that their need for food increases, so they usually make a

bigger web. Oh, they got to catch more little buggos. That's right. That's right. Kelly wants to know, after listening to a podcast called the Biology of Superheroes, Spider-Man episode, I have so many questions. Like, can it really be used in healing wounds and tendons and how thick would it need to be to support me in order to swing from building to building?

So we can go to the last one. I have no idea what your weight is, so I won't presume to say anything like that. We have had a student suspended in a chair from the ceiling and the line was narrower than a pencil. So it was not that big. Certainly in the Spider-Man movies, you look at the diameter of the silky shooting, there's no question that he could do what he does. Oh, this is changing how I feel about Spider-Man movies.

I like them even more now. And then what about biomedical purposes, tendons? Yeah. Patrons who wanted to know about medical uses are Lacey J. Schuer, Amanda, and Laura Merriman, who shouted out, oligite's beloved thermophysiologist, Dr. Shane Campbell-Staten, in his Biology of Superheroes podcast episode on Spider-Man as another excellent resource on medical uses of the silk. So we certainly think there's a good opportunity for artificial ligaments and artificial tendons

because one of the unique features about spider silk is that for whatever reason, it's almost impossible to get an immune response to it. Even when you try. So for instance, I know of nobody who's ever made antibodies to the main portion of the spider silk protein. You can make it to the end parts, you can't make it to the main part of the protein. And we've tried. We've tried different organisms, we've tried doing it different ways.

It just does not generate an immune reaction. And we've done some work here, not in massive detail, but we've demonstrated that you can implant our synthetic spider silk fibers and some of our synthetic fiber silk films into animals and not get any reaction at all. Which is a huge benefit. Absolutely. Absolutely. And Spidey Tech is a company, obviously, that you work with, that you're involved with.

And what do you think the kind of principal goal of Spidey Tech is? And also, how did you come up with a name? I didn't. Roberto came up with the names. I think that, you know, adhesives and coatings are going to be the first place we go because I think it's got the lowest barrier to market in terms of that. I think it has unique capabilities that aren't out there right now, which again, I think is important if you're coming out with a new product.

He mentioned to me that Spidey was a good way to get people not scared of spiders and to think of it enough kind of a, oh, Spidey, in a more friendly way. Yeah, and I think, you know, part of that comes from Spider-Man movie because Spidey certainly, you know, used multiple times there. You like the Spidey? So you're right. I think it does present a much more acceptable kind of a use as opposed to arachna cream or something like that.

Spidey does seem so friendly. I'm a spider. I make cool stuff here to help. That's right. Exactly. It's a very super heroic name. Eva also asked this question. Nadine wants to know, is it true that most spiders we see out in the world are female?

For the Orwee person, that's what most people see. The answer is yes. I mean, in general, the females do put out the webs. Many not maybe, I would say probably most of the males hang out and actually steal their food because they're much smaller. So they're only about a tenth the size of the females, steal their food and hope not to get eaten because I mean, the males are there for one thing. That's to deliver a sperm sac and to procreate.

That's the only thing they do. I have a delivery for you. They're just busters. They're just maybe pretty much leeches. Speaking of little disappointments, Emily asks, what are cobwebs versus spider webs? And why don't I notice the cobwebs until long after the spider is gone? So most cobwebs, the proteins that cobweb we reduce are in many cases very similar to the proteins the orb we first used.

So the cobweb is basically a three-dimensional net. It does not have any adhesive on it. So what happens is that the organism physically gets in and can't find its way out as opposed to being stuck on the web like with an orb web. And so that's one of the major differences. That's why most of those have a more potent poison because they got to catch them and keep them from getting away. Got it.

So like a black widow, it's a cobweb. Right. So if they're spun as a cobweb, they're a different structure, but also a cobweb can refer to that dusty web that's lost its stick and been abandoned. But just think of how many more cobwebs you would have to clean up if spiders didn't do it for you by eating them. Thank you, spider. I think part of the reason you don't see them normally is you usually see them after

they're abandoned and dust starts gathering on them. So when they're there, you want them so that you're not very visible because you want something to fly into it and then get lost in there. So if it's very visible, they're going to avoid it. So I think that the reason you see it is that their cobwebs and people usually think about them after they get dust on them. This is just my question. But how dope are your Halloween decorations every year?

Not all that much, actually. We don't do anything unique there. For some reason, to me, spiders are more an all year thing than a once a day thing. That's our once-a-year thing. I felt that way about Halloween when I was goth. I was like, don't dress up as me on one day. That's right. I'm like this all the time.

Yeah. I'm constantly wearing fishnet shirts. Don't do it just on Halloween, so I get it. Do you ever watch a movie about a haunted house and you think spiders wouldn't make those kind of webs? Yeah. But the fact is, is that the spider webs come in such a variety of different shapes and sizes that, you know, yeah, you'd say that's probably outlandish, but you'd never

say, oh, I wouldn't guarantee you'd never find one like that. Oh, I forgot to ask you before we get back to Patreon questions. Is there any flimflam that you'd like to debunk, like any myths about spiders or spider silk that you're just sick of hearing? Like, okay, let's clear this up. I think part of it is certainly that a lot of people believe that all the spiders are poisonous. But as far as as poisonous for humans, the answer is, that's just simply not true.

Right. You know, there's there's three, depending on how you argue about it, there might be a fourth one in the U.S. And Randy means venomous, poison is ingested, venom is injected, but you know what he means. Do not waste your finger muscles, emailing or tweeting me about it. Spend that energy giving a hardworking and busy spider a little wave, a little thumbs up. So the other thing is, is that a study done in Australia demonstrated and this was people

who came to the hospital claiming to have been bitten by a spider and they actually checked it and less than less than 10% of them were actually bitten by a spider. Really? Yeah. It's mosquitoes? Yeah. All kinds of other things. Some of them weren't even bites.

Oh. So, you know, you hear all these people say, oh yeah, I got a spider bite last night and you're going, you know, you've got a 90% chance of being full of it. Right. Trish, that's a hickey. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Dave, you've got a zit on your neck.

Yeah. Get out of here. Right. Someone asked, Jen Anathes asked, all this talk about eating bugs, can we eat spider webs? Sometimes that's the only thing I have in the house, shrug emoji, she says. There's a lot of protein. Could we one day be eating spider webs?

So first of all, there isn't a lot of protein. Most of the webs weigh very little. Okay. For instance, the entire gland that makes dragline silk is only good for about a hundred milligrams max. Now that's good for several hundred yards of single fiber silk, but that's not a lot to eat. Right.

Number two, the spider silk, I'm sure, is digestible to a certain extent, but what we found is that there are very few organisms who could break it down. So we know fungi can, but fungi can break down almost anything or at least some species of fungi can. So I think that that would probably not be a very nutritious way to go about augmenting your diet. Right. Not to mention it's expensive, right?

It would be expensive. Yeah. Like how much a kilogram? $2,500. Oh, that's like, I don't, I have no idea how much chicken costs a kilogram, but I'm thinking less. Yeah. Quite a bit less.

Quite a bit less. I have some numbers because I live in America and the only reference points I have for kilos are when there are headlines about people smuggling heroin in their suitcases or under two pays, but a kilo of chicken is 2.2 pounds, which is about half a whole roaster chicken or about $5 worth of chicken breasts, which is 300 times as expensive as spider silk. Probably even more, actually, if you're like starving for a spy drawing and lazy and you just have it delivered on postmates.

Only Marina wants to know, how do spiders use their silk to fly? I think he's talking about ballooning. Yeah. So ballooning. Yeah. So basically, especially when they're small, you know, there's a nest of 150 little litty beady spiders and they got to spread out if they're going to eat anything. So what happens is they usually go up into something, they lay a big line off the end

and when the wind gets up, they jump and their fate is now completely dependent on where they end up. But here in the spring, what happens is you can go out and see some of the fields and they look like they're coated with spider silk because all of these spiders have jumped and their lines are laying out across the, like the sagebrush or the grass or something like that. And I've seen pictures along the coast of California where you see that because the marine layer comes in and you get drops for dew forming on that.

So it looks like the whole entire thing is covered with spider silk because all these little guy lines are laying out there. Can't they get pretty high, like 10,000 feet of something? Yeah. They've found them. I think they've found them clear into the 30 to 40. I mean, up as high as the jet's fly. How do they not run out of silk?

They don't. They just put one thing and they let the wind get it. So it's like they're putting out a sail. So they use it like a sail. Oh my gosh. So it really is. Wherever the wind blows, yeah. You got that right.

You got that right. Wow. Okay. Zwellf Juniper wants to know, hiya. How many animals did you consider before landing on these goats? Not very many because the company we work with specifically focused on goats for a multitude of reasons. One being that these goats were called breed early, lactate early.

So five months are sexually mature. You breed them and five months later you have a goat producing milk. So in less than a year you've got a complete cycle. So that's a huge advantage and especially being here in Utah where dairy is a big business, we always get asked why goats and not cows. So the answer to that question is number one, milk production per pound of feed is basically the same in goats as it is in cows. They don't produce as much.

They're much easier to deal with. So a 1500 pound of cow doesn't want to go anywhere. You kind of backed into a corner. They also are much more adaptable human orientation. So our kids, shortly after they're born, after a couple of three days, are then fed by hand, milked by hand. And I'll guarantee you, they have no idea they're goats. They think they're humans.

So they really are easy to work with in terms of that. The waste is much less than it is with cows and makes it easier for cleanup and that's kind of stuff. And last but not least, my people tell you that baby goats are much cuter than baby cows. That's very factual. There's nothing cuter than a baby goat. That's a fact. Absolutely.

Did you like low-key love getting to work with the goats? Were you like, I never really realized that working with spider butts would lead me to getting to cuddle baby goats? No, not so much because I raised sheep when I was a kid and then when my kids started growing up, we moved out and had a place out of town and they raised sheep. So I got to see baby lambs, you know, multiple times every year. So baby goats probably are cuter than baby lambs, but not by a lot. I'm going to do a poll because I think that that would be a very heated debate, to be

honest. Yeah. Yeah, I certainly, it's a tough one because I certainly do like lambs. There's no doubt about it. Just do a transgenic one where we got a little bit of both. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Okay. I took a Twitter poll and at press time, it was baby goats in the lead 62%. I regret not including baby spiders in the poll, so that's now a mystery that's just lost to time. Right. Gregory O'Connway wants to know, Dear Alward, can we use spider silk to make a kick ass parachute? The answer is yes, but what we're probably more interested in is the parachute lines because one of the problems you have is that especially if you're dropping, let's say,

a tank out of a cargo and you want to go more frequently than I think any of the DOD would like to believe in the parachute collapses because obviously it goes out, it tries to open and then at the end, it goes wham when it opens up and it collapses. So we see is that if we made the guidelines out of spider silk, when it hit that end, it would just stretch it. So the parachute would no longer collapse. It would allow the guidelines to absorb all of that energy and then as we talked, it gets released as heat.

So it's not going to go bouncing up and down like a trampoline. It's going to go down and then slowly come back up and keep the parachute from collapsing. Now we may also want to do it for all the parachutes, but particularly those where you're dumping something heavy out, we could see this would be a huge advantage to what they have right now. And speaking of DOD stuff, what about armors, things like that? We don't see spider silk as, from our perspective anyway, as the way to go for protective armor, particularly things like bulletproof vests.

And the reason is it stretches too much and that's what's unique about it. That's what makes it key. So my joke is when somebody asks, is I know I can make you bulletproof vests, it just stops the bullet on the wrong side of your chest. So that's not particularly useful. Also, any movies that you've seen with spiders or spider webs that you... Oh, eight-legged freaks. Eight-legged freaks is a movie you have to see.

What is it? Oh, it's like the parody of every B horror movie you've ever seen. Radioactivity, Guy has spiders there. They all become giant spiders. This little 12-year-old kid sees it. He tries to go to the sheriff and tell the sheriff, the sheriff doesn't listen to the little kid. So these are loose, destroying, picking up trailer houses, chasing people down, having

eggs and magically getting giant whatever else. And then toward the end, somebody said, this little kid comes and says, you know, I know what's going on. And somebody says, sheriff, why don't you listen to the little kid? And so they finally managed to clear out. But it's like when it first came out, I took everybody in the lab for the movie. We went and I said, everybody has to come up with at least 10 things that are absolutely totally false that they find in this movie.

And trust me, we had lots more than 10 that we could find. It was... It's hilarious. It's absolutely hilarious. But those things are also delightful because they're so false. Absolutely. Right. Absolutely.

Some people don't see it that way, which is the unfortunate part. Here, spiders just going about their business and the things that they're making naturally could literally save our lives. I hope so. So thanks, spiders. Thank you, spider. Just get one of those little spider catchers, take them outside, let them go do their business, let them keep evolving.

It's been 500 million years. That's right. That's right. The thing that you hate the most about your job or about spider silk, what's so either annoying or irksome or just troubling? Is there anything that you're just like, ugh, this sucks? For us, I think it has been heading toward the commercialization direction just because it's been difficult to convince people that it can have advantages over what they're

currently using, particularly in the medical world. It's astounding to me that advances ever get made in medicine based on our experiences because these people, if you say you're going to have to go back to the FDA for approval, immediately it's off the table. They would rather have inferior products. So one, for instance, we've made a hernia mesh that is far superior to what they use right now. Absolutely no question.

But hernia meshes are off the table. There is not a company that we know of any that wants to touch it because of lawsuits around vaginal meshes failing, hernia meshes failing. Well, the reason they fail this because they're made out of lousy material. But you talk to them and it's like, we're not touching it with a 10-foot pole. We don't want to have to take on, we don't want to have to do the FDA testing. We don't want to deal with possible lawsuits. We don't want anything to do with it.

So we'll keep using our lousy stuff. So it's that technology has advanced faster than maybe mindsets. Certainly acceptance. Yeah. But I think it's so great to know how it's made and that it's a protein structure that is so versatile and that it can be manufactured. I think it's just so unreal to people because it's so science fiction. You're like, oh no, this is 2019.

We can actually do this now, which is so exciting. And what about the best thing about spider silk or your job? I think the best thing about my job and I always say that, you know, it's coming to work and having a realistic expectation that you're going to find something new multiple times a year. I have to say that other than a day I have meetings all day, I have not dreaded a day coming to work since I started. For 30 years?

For 30 years. You've got to get this cake, man. Yeah. You deserve it. You've got a great job. And where can people find out more about you or about your work or about Spidey Tech? Certainly, Spidey Tech has a website. We have a website on USU.

If you just do spider silk USU, you'll get to our website and we have a Facebook page. We're not quite as good on the social media side of things. Yeah. You've got to get a social media. Yeah. That's right. I'm afraid it's passed me by. So it's...

You're not out at Coachella wearing a spider hat and just being an influencer? No, I am not and I'm not tweeting to keep up with the president. I don't have anything else here, so... Hashtag Spidey Life. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for doing this. This was such a joy. Certainly.

Enjoyed it. Enjoyed it. Okay. So ask smart people some silky questions because you'll never know what they know unless you ask. And I hope this has given you greater appreciation for our leggy friends. And this Halloween season, when you see a spider web decoration, just feel free to stop everyone around you, inform them of the molecular engineering that goes into it.

Maybe if you get a spider web in your face, you don't like cotton candy. That shit's expensive. So for more on the topics discussed, you can head over to my website for links. It's alleyward.com slash allergies slash spideronology. And there are links to sponsors and codes in the show notes as well. And for merch, there's a link at alleyward.com. Thank you. Shannon Felsen and Bonnie Dutch of the podcast, You Are That, which is a hilarious podcast.

For managing that. Thank you to Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lippo for adminning the Facebook Allergy's podcast group. A few things live appearance wise, I'm keynoting SICOM Camp in Southern California on November 8th. And there may still be a few spots left in case you can convince your work or your lab or yourself that this conference is an important thing to attend to communicate science. You can go to SICOMCamp.com.

They have more details. And it's November 8th through 10th. The lineup is awesome. It includes flash forwards Rose Eveleth and the physics girl Diana Cowan. Also on October 17th, it's the International Miloma Foundations Annual Comedy Benefit in LA. And it's hosted by Ray Romano. And there are performances by Patton Oswald and Amanda Seals and Demetri Martin and Kevin

Nealon. And I'm hosting the Red Carpet Live on the IMF Facebook page. And there will be links to all this in the show notes or up at alleyward.com slash allergies slash spidronology. And thank you to Jared Sleeper of the Mental Health Podcast, my good bad brain, for assistant editing and to the center of our webs, Stephen Ray Morris of the Percast and C Jurassic Right for adhering the pieces together each week. And if you listen to the end of the podcast, you know, I tell you a secret.

And this week's secret, Shannon and Bonnie stayed down here in LA. And when they did, they left a loaf of sourdough bread. And I've just been slowly eating it piece by piece by putting it in the microwave until it's all gooey and then putting butter on it and then putting salt on top of that and just walking around eating this soggy piece of buttery bread. And I'll have you know, Shannon and Bonnie, I finished it today. I tore through it like a locust. Also while I recorded all these asides, Grammy, my dog is sitting next to me and she is wearing

a spider themed sweater that I got her. So do keep an eye out. I will be posting a picture of her and the spider sweater on Instagram. Okay, bye bye. Hack a Dermatology. Dozeology. Cryptozeology. Litology.

Antipnology. Meteorology. Peptology. Nephology. Psyriology. Pseminology. The Internet. The Internet.

The Internet. The Internet. The Internet.