Park Square client Bolt Threads, an Emeryville, CA-based industrial biotechnology/biotextiles firm, is on the cusp of revolutionizing the performance apparel industry by cracking the code on how to "spin," or more accurately stated, brew, spider silk.
In 1709, François Xavier Bon de Saint Hilaire, the president of the Court of Accounts, Aides, and Finances in Montpellier, France, presented the Sun King, Louis XIV, with a pair of silvery spider-silk stockings, woven from hundreds of painstakingly collected egg sacs. “The only difficulty now lies in procuring a sufficient quantity of Spiders Bags to make any considerable work of it,” Bon wrote in a letter to Britain’s Royal Society the following year. More than three centuries later, that not-so-inconsiderable difficulty has been overcome, and non-royals will, for the first time, have the opportunity to purchase their very own spider-silk apparel—specifically, a woven tie, dyed petrol blue and produced in a limited edition of fifty by Bolt Threads, a Bay Area-based biotechnology company.
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/in-the-future-well-all-wear-spider-silk
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