(Inside Science) -- Even though he works with spiders regularly, Yao Zhang, a physicist at Jinan University in China, admits he's afraid of them. In fact, most of the people in his lab are, except for graduate student Zhiyong Gong, who keeps spiders as pets in his dorm. Naturally, Gong was the one who volunteered to harvest spider silk in the lab as part of the group's efforts to study how the silk can be used to benefit the human world. "He was the real 'Spider-man'," said Zhang.