New Haven -4.1.06 Yale University’s Office of Cooperative Research and Bead Industries of Milford, CT announced today a remarkable harvest of university and industry collaboration. The 100 year old manufacturer of bead chain has turned to cutting edge research to create an entirely organic production technology to produce its signature product.

Yale molecular biologist Jack Stockbean has restructured the DNA of garden variety peas (pisum satvum) to create non-endospermic seeds and hypocotyl links of steel: bead chain. Dr Stockbean had set out to enrich the iron and mineral nutritive values of the Fabaceae family. His Frank’nbeans as they are affectionately known on Yale’s Science Hill are in his words “a serendipitous fruit of that research”. Dr Stockbean hastens to add that his chains are not to be consumed as food and thus require no FDA approval or USDA regulation.

University vice president, Michael Morand, commented: “Jack is far too modest about his work. Few people know that he started out in work with cows and, before any of that research made it to the marketplace, he traded careers for work in plant genetics. His the the kind of intellectual fluidity that the University is most proud of.” Of the Bead Industries collaboration, Matthew Nemerson, president of the Connecticut Technology Council said: “This level of science will work pure magic for Connecticut manufacturers. It’s a fairy tale come true.”

Bead Industries will show off its beta harvest Thursday, April 6th at the Eli Whitney Museum. A company spokesperson said: “Whitney’s forge shaped 19th Century American manufacturing. It is appropriate that we introduce this product, through which we will forge the future, on the Whitney site. Our products have always inspired creativity.” An exhibition of bead chain inventions will accompany this technical premiere. More information.