Science Has Spun Spidey’s Web-Slinging Into Reality

Slowly but surely, we are making good on the gadgets we imagined, as kids, that the future would hold. Penny Brown’s video watch from Inspector Gadget? Check. The Starfleet tricoder from Star Trek? Almost there. But web-shooting? Web-slinging? That wasn’t one we really thought would make the crossover. And it wasn’t exactly in the plans for the scientist who has made the strong, sticky air-spun web a reality either, Marco Lo Presti, from Tufts University’s Silklab.

Back in 2020, Lo Presti, a research assistant professor in biomedical engineering, was working on the challenge of underwater adhesives. The first material he chose to work on was made up of silk and dopamine, a popular combination because it mimics the way that mussels stick firmly to rock surfaces in water—something that has been useful in other applications.

“While using acetone to clean the glassware of this silk and dopamine substance,” he says, “I noticed it was undergoing a transition into a solid format, into a web-looking material, into something that looked like a fiber. I showed the vials to Fio, and we immediately started thinking about how we could make a remote adhesive [a substance that sticks to an object from a distance] out of it.”

Fio is Fiorenzo Omenetto, professor of engineering at Tufts and “puppeteer” of the Silklab. “We’d like to say that every experiment is painstakingly planned with equations and lots of forethought but it’s really about connection,” he says. “You explore and you play and you sort of connect the dots. Part of the play that is very underestimated is where you say “hey, wait a second, is this like a Spider-Man thing?” And you brush it off at first, but a material that mimics superpowers is always a very, very good thing.”

Before Lo Presti could turn his attention to these accidental webs, though, he had to complete his paper on underwater adhesives using biomolecules, which he did in 2021. A lot of the Silklab’s work is “bio-inspired” by spiders and silkworms, mussels and barnacles, velvet worm slime, even tropical orchids—so working out if this sticky web could become something useful might seem like an easy side-step for the team.

However, Lo Presti points out that while the new material does mimic spider threads, “there is no spider able to eject, to shoot a stream of solution, which turns into a fiber and does the remote capturing of a distant object”. This was something new, for the real world at least.

But as the research paper in Advanced Functional Materials notes—enter fictional characters. In Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s original 1960s comic books, starting with Amazing Fantasy #15, Peter Parker builds a “little device”, one fastened to each wrist and triggered by finger pressure, to produce strands of ejectable ‘spider webs’. By the time of the mid-2000s Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, the web-shooting switched from a wrist-worn spinneret gadget to an organic part of his superhero transformation.