The Thought Emporium
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2020–2022
32:47 · 2.9M views · Sep 22, 2020
The Thought Emporium shows how they engineered a yeast strain to produce real spider silk, after more than two years of lab work and many failures. The video explains the genetic engineering process behind it.
HN commenters cite it as proof that cutting-edge biotech is becoming accessible to home labs, much like computing in the 1980s.
5 comments from Hacker News
I watched this cool youtube video by Thought Emporium where he makes custom spider silk: this video Just seems like he reads the manufacturer's instructions!
With a germ you can kill a few million people - [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] If you want to see someone do cool stuff with the above: [LINK] this video
The point of capitalism is to align the interests of those with no scruples with the interests of everyone else. How well it does this and what else might do better is a matter for frequent — and loud — debate, but it is certainly better aligned than the feudal setup which preceded it. Anyway, here is a link to some open-sourced generically engineered spider-silk producing yeast, to demonstrate that advanced cutting-edge biotech is getting to be as accessible as computing was getting in the 80s: this video
I don’t think anyone physically could horde it for even as long as 20 years no matter how hard they tried. Tech has a way of diffusing rapidly — things that start off only affordable by the richest yuppies of Wall Street and London can be superseded by street-wares in Nairobi, and this is not limited to just computers and phones, for example one of the YouTube channels I follow genetically engineered yeast to produce spider silk: this video
That's the easy part (literally possible in a home laboratory: this video ), the encapsulant and microfluidics for getting the mRNA into it seems to be the hard part.