I don’t really know what John Kass is talking about in his Chicago Tribune column: some scary combination of personal experience with featherless chickens that he put into strange positions, genetically engineered animals (that he has nothing to with) and non-existent chimeras such as “superchickens” that he’s scared of, and biotechnology companies that he’s chastising for cloning a goat that produces “silk milk” containing a protein that has the properties of spider silk, namely that it is 25% more tensile than any other polymer in the world.
Not that this is anything new, Nexia Biotech has been doing this, as in cloning the goats that produce this biopolymer since 1998. But all I know is that it has Kass’ feathers ruffled and it makes for interesting, even if it isn’t novel, reading.
Summer Johnson, PhD