NAME: Randy Lewis
VOCATION: Professor of
microbiology
MARRIED: To his
high school sweetheart
CURRENT
FUNDERS: National Institutes of Health, National
Science Foundation, Air Force
BREAKTHROUGHS: Sequenced genes for
several Rocky Mountain arachnids, including cat face, garden, wolf,
jumping, and brown widow spiders.
KNOWN
FOR: Wearing gray or tan Wranglers.
FAVORITE TIME OF DAY: Lunch.
“It’s the one hour that I have to myself, to sit and
think.” He usually eats a piece of fruit – because, he
says, it’s mindless.
AGE: 56
Like many
other Wyoming natives, Randy Lewis enjoys bird hunting, fly-fishing
and the rural life. The 40 ewes that graze his pasture south of
Laramie are show sheep, carefully bred to have muscular loins and a
wrinkle-free hide. Lewis has gallons of goat milk in the fridge.
But he doesn’t drink it; he uses it to spin spider silk.
Stronger than steel and stretchier than nylon — the
toughest fiber in nature — spider silk has been coveted by
humans for centuries. In 1709, a Frenchman made socks from the egg
sacs of spiders. Modern researchers envision even more extravagant
uses: bulletproof vests, surgical thread, and, because the human
body does not reject spider silk, artificial limbs. But mass
production is a challenge: Spider farms tend to erupt in hairy
sweatshop violence, the workers fighting and then feasting on one
another.
Lewis, a professor of microbiology, has created
an alternative to that cannibalism. He has decoded the genetic
information of the proteins in spider silk, cloned the genes, and
spun silk fibers from proteins produced in bacteria and
goat’s milk. His 19 years of research have brought $7.2
million to the University of Wyoming and an estimated 78 students
into his labs.
“What I hope we can do is understand
exactly how the spider silk properties are generated by the
protein, so we can design a protein and say, ‘It’ll
have this much elasticity and this much strength,’ ”
says Lewis. He speaks in a hurry, like a man with a mind that never
stops.
At home, Lewis keeps tabs on the arachnids outside
— where they are, how many eggs they lay. But he squashes the
ones that venture indoors, with a pragmatism rooted in his
childhood. He and his three siblings grew up on a barley and hay
farm in Powell, Wyo., bottle-feeding lambs in the bathroom. Their
dad died when Randy was 9. Their mom worked as a nurse, and Randy,
the oldest, often shot duck for the dinner table. “We all
looked up to him,” says his sister, Cindy Lewis, adding,
“We were really careful about eating ducks from Randy. We
were always having to spit out the BBs.” Randy’s
responsibilities didn’t keep him from chasing after
knowledge, however. “I always say, he’s the smartest
person I’ve ever known,” Cindy says. Several times.
After graduating from the California Institute of
Technology, Lewis received his Ph.D. at the University of
California in San Diego. While studying ways to produce silkworm
silk from bacteria (something he later concluded wasn’t
economically viable), he came across Army reports on spider silk,
published in 1968. He was already on the faculty of the University
of Wyoming, and he applied for an exploratory grant. Within a year,
Lewis had identified one of the two proteins that make up
“dragline” silk — the strongest of six varieties
of spider silk. When a spider climbs a bedpost, it secretes
dragline silk for security. This safety rope, which can support
400,000 pounds per square inch, is still the focus of Lewis’
research.
Over the years, Lewis has decoded five
varieties of silk, and is working on the sixth. He’s cloned
and sequenced the genes of over 34 species of spider, grown plants
that produce spider silk, and is working on consistency in the
spinning process. But Lewis also applies his brains to less serious
questions. When the Canadian Broadcasting System asked him if
Spider-Man’s web-spewing escapades were feasible, Lewis
analyzed a scene from the movie. He concluded that Spider-Man could
not have consumed enough calories and protein in a 24-hour period
to supply as much silk as he used.
Cindy, like her
brother, talks at a rapid boil. She says Lewis is “pretty
darn amazing. He cooks. He sews.” Lewis once made Cindy a
quilt, and has sewed sleeping bags and tents. Perhaps one day
he’ll thread his needle, even his fly rod, with spider silk.
The author is an
HCN intern
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Lewis’ Web.
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