It was allegedly a young Chinese imperial concubine in 2600 bc who thought up the following recipe for rearranging beta pleated sheets of glycine-rich polypeptides into fine fabrics: take a moth caterpillar, feed it mulberry leaves for a month, let it spin a cocoon, heat it to kill it, put the cocoon in water to unstick the silk threads, carefully draw out the single kilometre-long thread from which the cocoon is made by reeling it on to a wheel, spin the thread and weave a fabric. Then dye, cut and sew, advertise and sell for cash. Rough guide on quantities: it takes about ten pounds of
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