Does whatever a spider can

Matthew Du Plessis: Goats are the latest thing again. I bet you didn't know that.

I'm not just talking about the recent ascendence of mohair on catwalks and in boutiques - a phenomenon I have been assured by people who know about such things is not in the least bit fictional, despite the scratchiness. (Although I bet the models are having something to say about it.)

Neither am I talking about the rise in demand for goats milk, as the incidence of lactose intolerance and sensitivity to cows milk grows around the world.

And I am most certainly not talking about the abuse of goats by lonely hearts that to this day takes place in rural areas around the world. Ick.

No, today the goats are the latest of things because of the genetic cross-pollination that has taken place, the transferring of genes across species, genus and phylum, to imbue these animals not with the proportionate strength and agility of a spider, as in the case of everybody's favourite neighbourhood wall-crawler, but with the ability to spin webs out of spider silk.

I know what you're thinking. The answer is no.

Every time it rains, you're not suddenly going to find goats crawling through the bathroom window and up the shower curtain. At least, I shouldn't think so. Neither are you going to find spider-goats swinging around town fighting crime, or catching flies or small children in giant webs spun out between swings in the playground.

What you will find is that the farming of spider-silk has suddenly become commercially viable for the first time in human history.

Oh, sure, it's possible to milk a single spider of some of its silk if you've lots of time and lots of patience and a pair of tweezers. But to obtain enough spider silk to do anything useful? You'd need lots of spiders. And you can't keep lots of spiders together.

They'll eat each other.

Sure, spider silk - with its extraordinary nanotube-like flexibility and tensile strength - would make excellent surgical thread, or replacements for tendons and ligaments, and if woven together into some sort of garment? Well, so long Kevlar.

But farming the stuff? Forget about it. Until now, of course. Or rather, until 10 years ago.

Those of you who keep track of such things will point out this is all rather old news: at the turn of the millennium, a Canadian company called Nexia Biotechnologies in Quebec announced that it had done exactly this - spliced the spider genes responsible for creating silk into the DNA of female goats, which when they began lactating, produced silk in their milk that could then be harvested.

Nexia trademarked their product as "Biosteel", and there was much rejoicing in the heavens, or at least in the newsroom I was working in at the time. We were living in the future. Hurrah!

Except Nexia went bust.

And so no bulletproof vests or artificial organically grown tendon replacements or space-elevator cables made out of spider silk.

Until now! Again!

Molecular biologist Randy Lewis is using the same process to produce silk-bearing goats on a farm in Wyoming, USA.

He told News.com.au's tech editor, Peter Farquhar, that the goats were milked, and the silk protein filtered out and converted into usable material via a simple process, and that about a metre of silk can be harvested from every drop of protein gathered.

By the sounds of things, his team are ramping up and, barring going belly up like Nexia, within a few years there should be plenty of spiderwebbish material on the market, possibly starting, Lewis told Farquhar, with fishing line.

I hope the folks farming angoras out near Graaff Reinet in the Eastern Cape are paying attention: Here's a chance to branch out without having to expand the herd.

When you can get a Kevlar vest with every mohair blanket purchased, what better Trans Karoo cash cow is there than a transgenic spider-powered goat?