During meeting period on Tuesday, I walked into to Seto Hall completely oblivious to the wondrous world of spiders. Dr. Hayashi began her talk by explaining to us how she landed into the profession of being a spider silk researcher. She stressed the fact that throughout her experiences, she went with the flow and found that certain opportunities were presented to her. It was interesting to hear how she allowed her curiosity and desire to lead her life towards something unknown.
When Dr. Hayashi began to talk about spiders and silks I was fascinated at how complex and special the process was. She explored in vivid detail how a spider creates the silks from a duct in their abdomen. She explained that spiders have multiple kinds of silks that they emit from their bodies used for various purposes. I found it interesting that different kinds of silks served different purposes. Besides the known silk used to build webs, some silks were made to protect the mother’s eggs, while others were uses to make droplets. As Dr. Hayashi began to talk about her research, I was intrigued at how silks were very complex, useful materials that can be helpful to humans. I found it particularly interesting when she showed that her research led to the genome of spider silks, which in turn helped her to program tomato and tobacco plants to create the silk. She explained that her research was useful and innovative because of the variety of physical properties that spider silks have. The silks are as durable as Kevlar, biodegradable, far more stretchy than elastin, and is a lightweight material that can take in a lot of force. These ideas made me ponder, along with my fellow peers in the audience, how spider silks could help to provide inventions of the future by utilizing such a strong material. Dr. Hayashi’s journey towards her spider research showed me that there is much in the world that humans have yet to discover. As she says, “with every solution, there are ten more questions that arise”. I no longer view spiders as just household pests, but rather interesting creatures that could contain lots of value to humans.
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