check this shit out
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgSmt9b6BmA
they actually did it i cant believe it

It's called biotechnology. People do it with with a similar way in other domesticated animals as well like cows and sheep with a whole range of other proteins. By that way many protein-based pharmaceuticals can be produced such as insulin for Type I diabetics and alpha 1-antitrypsin for people with emphysema.

The idea is pretty old and started from creating transgenic bacteria to produce the desired proteins. We slowly moved to other species (like mammals in this video) because of their ability to produce the proteins in a better way and because of the ease of their extraction. Making goats produce the protein in the milk means you can collect the milk and then use fairly straightforward techniques to isolate the expressed protein to purity for whatever downstream applications.

And I do not see anything wrong with that, as opposed to all those catastrophologists who comment on this video or imagine the end of the of the world because of a so called "Frankenstein goat". This can happen when people comment on matters they do not fully understand.

Science is not evil, it is always the people who misuse science (and technology)

That said, I see no difference between bronze era people extracting copper to make better tools (and also better warfare equipment) and us creating this goat to make better tools (and also better warfare equipment)......

I know this ia little of topic but in china they engineered bioluminescent cats. They glow Red in the dark.

Very nice work indeed.
I always wondered when someone would do that.

What will be real interesting to see are the studies on the quality of the silk, he never elaborated on that. Can they purify and make silk that has the same high quality properties as what is being made by the spider (i.e. are the missing some key component, other protein, assembly issues, etc).
As any biotechnologist will say it is not just getting the protein(s) expressed but functioning properly that is the real hard part.

Then of course can they engineer the protein and make it better than nature did through evolution.

Yeah, it seems like they might need to make an assembly system a little more similar to a spider's silk glands than a syringe squeezing the stuff into alcohol. Simply denaturing the protein doesn't necessarily mean it's solidified in an optimal configuration. From the strand the reporter was playing with, it seemed like it was a lot more elastic than the spider silk you find in nature.