Biotech: The future of materials
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can spider silk and grasshopper rubber, brewed by vats of genetically modified microbes, wean us off our addiction to oil-based plastics?
Manuela Saragosa explores what sounds like an environmentalist sci-fi utopia. She speaks to Daniel Meyer, head of corporate planning at Spiber, a Japanese company that is already trying to commercialise clothes and car parts made of synthetic spider silk. Meanwhile Christophe Schilling, chief executive of California-based Genomatica, is using a similar biotechnology to manufacture good old-fashioned nylon.
But there is one potential problem: The microbes that make these fantastic new materials need to be fed lots and lots of sugar - but where will it all come from? Agnieszka Brandt-Talbot of Imperial College in London thinks she has an answer, and it involves that most sugary of substances - wood.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Close up of a Furrow Spider on its web in a Pennsylvania meadow in summer; Credit: Cwieders/Getty Images)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa, and this is Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:06.2 | Coming up, the materials grown from live organisms. |
| 0:09.8 | There's the super rubbery, resalin protein in the back legs of a grasshopper that allow it to jump so high. |
| 0:16.3 | And when you think about spandex, for example, a protein like that could be very exciting. |
| 0:21.9 | The future of fabrics and materials mixes sci-fi with environmentalism. |
| 0:26.6 | But will these new materials ever be as cheap as nylon and plastics? |
| 0:31.0 | It's really hard to predict. |
| 0:33.2 | I wish I had the crystal ball. |
| 0:35.6 | I think it will take decades. |
| 0:37.3 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. I wish I had the crystal ball. I think it will take decades. |
| 0:40.7 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:44.4 | All right. |
| 0:48.5 | So this is Z. |
| 0:52.3 | So there's a white jacket you've just taken out. |
| 0:53.1 | Parker. |
| 0:58.0 | Our producer Lawrence Mite isn't universally known for sartorial elegance, |
| 1:01.4 | but he was very keen to sample this particular jacket. |
| 1:02.0 | There you go. |
| 1:02.5 | There we go. |
| 1:05.8 | And it's got inside the logo of the North Face, |
| 1:07.4 | which is a popular clothing chain. |
| 1:12.6 | And it says spiber times goldwin, joint research and development. This has been produced with synthetic spider silk. Exactly. Yes, you heard that right. A jacket made of synthetic |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.