Golden orbweaver spiders from Madagascar secrete the only spider silk that is gold in color, not white. And now a five-year project to create a cape is finished and on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. This is the first spider silk textile made since the late 19th Century.

Nicholas Godley and Simon Peers with Their Spider Silk Cape

Clothing designer Nicholas Godley designed the garment. He says, “The color is just incredible. It’s incredibly strong, incredibly soft, incredibly sticky.” But his creation goes beyond being just a fashion experiment. He adds, “In the scientific and medical world at least spider silk is many ways the Holy Grail — in many ways it’s one of the most incredible materials.”

1.2 million spiders made the golden silk thread that built the gold brocaded cape.

Textile expert Simon Peers explains the process, starting with the spiders. He says, “You can’t keep spiders together because they are cannibals — they eat each other.”

Golden Orbweaver Spiders from Madagascar

Once the spiders have finished their work, four strands of silk are twisted together to make an ultra-strong and extremely flexible golden thread for a team of humans to sew into fabric. This particular spider silk stretches another forty percent of its resting length, which makes it very difficult to work with as a textile.

Peers is a British expatriate who moved to Madagascar over 20 years ago where he established a business to promote and explore the island nation’s heritage of weaving.

According to Wired.com in 2009,

Peers conceived the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them.

Science News tells a slightly different tale.

At some point, Peers shared what he had learned with a friend who was doing academic research on Madagascar’s textiles. “And she enthused about this whole idea of spider silk,” Peers recalls. “In fact, she pursued it a little further than I did,” turning up details of the original machine that was used to “silk” spiders for that World’s Fair fabric. While in France, she had one small element of the silker reproduced and made Peers a present of the mechanical piece.

It then sat on a shelf in his office for years. Many, many years.

At the time the Godley and Peers project had made a large piece of fabric but had not cut the garment yet into a cape yet.

Textile expert Simon Peers and Fashion Designer Nicholas Godley Flank Model Bianca Gavrilas Wearing a Hand-Embroidered Spider Silk Cape

Molecular biologist Randy Lewis is also stuck on spider silk and is always looking for new practical applications for the material in the real world. With a tensile strength greater than steel and even kevlar (used in bullet-proof vests) spider silk is an ultralight weight material that could stop a speeding bullet.

Lewis lives in Wyoming and decided to combine his knowledge of animal husbandry with cutting-edge genetics. In the process he made transgenic goats that produced spider silk in their milk. That’s one way to overcome the spider labor problem faced by Godley and Peers.

Peers estimates that the spider silk project took hundreds of thousands of hours when you factor in the work of the spiders.

Excerpt from NOVA’s Making Stuff show about spider silk, featuring Simon Peers and Randy Lewis.

For years, scientists have been talking about the era of personalized medicine. While many preparations are underway, the biggest hurdle to widespread adoption has been the prohibitive cost to read a person’s entire DNA. Our genetic code provides a full road map to preventing and treating disease. We just don’t know how to read it yet.

Since the first entire human genome was sequenced in 2000, the price and time it takes has tumbled into affordability.

But the entire biotechnology industry has rested on the belief that personalized medicine won’t work until it takes a day or less to map a whole human genome and the cost reaches the $1,000 price point.

Well, 2012 is the year. At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Life Technologies unveiled its latest gadget, a $150,000 high-speed gene sequencer, which allows entire human genome sequencing for $1,000 per genome.

Outfitted with a semiconductor chip instead of tiny microscopes, the Benchtop Ion Proton sequencer is ready to read our DNA fast and cheap. That means this technology will quickly move from the research lab to the doctor’s office where patients will pay a little more than the $1,000 it costs to sequence a full genome.

There are companies already doing some high-speed, fast-turnaround gene sequencing. But they rely on just pieces of a genome, looking for particular markers to identify risk for specific diseases. No company until now has been able to run a full genome for $1,000 in less than a day.

Life Technologies’ Dr. Robert Bennett says, “For the first time, you’ll be able to sequence an entire human genome in a matter of a few hours.”

Immediately following the announcement, the company said that Baylor College of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, and The Broad Institute have signed on as the first three customers of the new semiconducting gene sequencer.

Dr. Richard Gibbs, Director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor says, “A genome sequence for $1,000 was a pipe-dream, just a few years ago.”

Not to be outdone, another company that builds gene sequencers also just announced that its new generation of machine will read an entire genome in less than 24 hours. Illumina hasn’t announced how much it will cost on a per genome basis.

It’ll be a year or so before these lightweight machines will begin showing up in doctor’s offices. But when they do it is still unclear what running a person’s genome will show.

Doctors must first be trained to use the new technology. The power of personalized medicine and the promise of rapid, inexpensive gene sequencing lies in being able to identify genetic mutations to make medicine more effective, reduce drug interactions, improve preventive health and give the patient more information about his or her health.

But this kind of broad ability could also open up a pandora’s box of privacy concerns. Namely, how much of a person’s genetic information should be accessible to insurance companies, which conceivably could discriminate against people with predisposed genetic risks for certain diseases.

Regardless of any controversy, reaching the genome milestone of $1,000 per genome is changing the face of medicine forever.

Richard Lifton, Chair of the Department of Genetics at Yale School of Medicine says, “The technological advances in the new instrument promise to be game-changing for both research and clinical applications.”

It sounds like something right out of Jurassic Park but scientists in Japan have plans to bring the long-extinct mammoth back to life using cloning technology within the next 5 years.

Akira Iritani, a professor emeritus at Kyoto University in Japan, is looking to resurrect the woolly mammoth using a new cloning technique.

The plan would take genes from a mammoth and insert them into an embryo which would be placed inside an elephant. If the clone is successful a baby mammoth would be born.

No doubt this will spark an ethical debate about reviving extinct species and cloning.

Some scientists say the odds of getting the necessary mammoth tissue and creating a successful clone in five years are less than 50-50.

Mammoths have been extinct for about 8,000 years.

David Nichols studies the way psychedelic drugs act in the brains of rats. But he’s haunted by how humans hijack his work to make street drugs, sometimes causing overdose deaths. He was hoping that his work would lead to new ways of treating psychiatric disorders not become club drugs.

Today the journal Nature published an essay by Dr. Nichols where he describes the ethical dilemma he and and other neuroscientists face.

“I had never considered the possibility that something I’ve done might lead directly or even indirectly to somebody dying.” — David Nichols, Purdue University

A Yeast Cell with Synthetic Genes, courtesy of Dr. Pamela Silver, Harvard Medical School

Life is often stranger than fiction. But the direction that biology is heading, synthetic life could be stranger than science fiction.

The emerging field of synthetic biology is moving closer and closer to creating new forms of life in the lab.

Scientists who do research on animals are being harassed, having their test subjects stolen, their families threatened, homes flooded and cars bombed. Even administrators who aren’t doing direct animal research are being targeted by extreme animal activists.

The first arrests under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act were made in February. And, universities that have long been silent on the issue, are taking steps to better protect scientists and their research.

Dr. P. Michael Conn sat down with REALscience this week to talk about the increase in extremist attacks in recent years. Listen Here.

It’s a difficult question, …I encourage the minimum use of experiments on animals, the absolute minimum amount of pain. Only perform highly necessary experiments, and as little pain as possible. If it must be done, [if that is your path, it is compassionate] to kill out of necessity, but only with empathy. Hold in you the sense of the compassionate: ‘I acknowledge that I exploit this animal to bring greater benefit to a great number of sentient beings.’ You must feel the sacrifice, in your heart. It is never made lightly. —His holiness the Dalai Lama

2009 is Darwin year, the bicentenary of the British naturalist’s birth, and 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work “The Origin of Species.” An exhibition has opened in London’s Museum of Natural History.

The major milestone was to have begun the Year of Evolution but the idea itself evolved into the Year of Science. Charles Darwin’s birthday is Feb. 12.

Here’s the official list of Darwin-related events.

Some of the top scientific minds met at University of Washington last spring. Their purpose–to discuss the future of personal genomics.

They met on the eve of the passage of the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act.

MIT biology professor Eric Lander, The Wellcome Trust’s Dr. Leena Peltonen, Bill Gates III, and Harvard Geneticist George Church discussed the state of the science.

Dr. Maynard Olson moderated the panel as they discussed the implications of knowing genetic predispositions for disease, talked about ways to get the public more engaged and, they shared whether or not they each had their genome sequenced or would if the chance arose.

Bill Gates, through his foundation, is trying to find cures to what ails us. He’s taking on malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases that kill millions every year. With better understanding of genes and our whole genetic map–our genomes–he says we can eradicate these global killers.

Eric Lander Background (26 minutes)
eric-lander-biology-background.mp3

Discussion moderated by Maynard Olson (37 minutes)
moderated-discussion-with-maynard-olson.mp3

Bill Gates comments (8 minutes)
bill-gates-on-personalized-genome.mp3

British scientists now have permission to create human-cow hybrid embryos to further stem cell research of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Protests began last fall leading up to the decision on January 17. Many are opposed to the crossing of the line between animals and people. Previously mouse-cow hybrid embryos proved that this process would probably work with human cells.

“The induced cells do all the things embryonic stem cells do. It’s going to completely change the field,” says Dr. James Thomson, professor of anatomy at University of Wisconsin and the scientist who first isolated human embryonic stem cell lines in 1998.

The man who started the stem cell war could be the one to end it.

Scientists in Oregon have successfully cloned embryos from a rhesus monkey, sparking new ethical questions regarding stem cell research.

What’s killing all the honey bees? No one knows for sure. But a lot of different people are pointing at more than one culprit. Colony Collapse Disorder is the newly-minted term for bees abandoning their hives when they go out to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops . Even the Secretary of Agriculture is worried that the missing bees could cost at least $15 billion.