China To Begin Cattle Cloning

You either have fifty-fifty, or you have a choice of having the genetics 100 percent from Daddy or 100 percent from Mummy.

Boyalife’s head Xu Xiaochun recently told reporters that the demand for beef cattle skyrocketed in recent years, and farmers often fail to meet that demand. “This is only a choice”. The facility is set to open some time in the next seven months, with the goal of cloning approximately one million cows by the year 2020, according to Yahoo!

The Tianjin commercial cloning facility will have gene bank capable of storing as much as five million cell samples frozen in liquid nitrogen.

Construction of the main building has already started in Tianjin, northeastern China. But it’s not just cloning and raising cattle for beef.

“The most important thing with any technology being used in the food supply is to ensure that products made from those technologies are safe to eat”, Gregory Jaffe, biotech project director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said.

Scientists at the company are will also focus on using the method to clone champion racehorses and highly trained sniffer dogs as well as help rescue endangered species from extinction. “If this is allowed, I don’t think there are other companies better than Boyalife that make better technology”, Xu said. The collaboration aims to create better test animals for various studies about diseases.

And it is a short biological step from monkeys to humans – potentially raising a host of moral and ethical controversies.

Thus, it is exercising self-restraint to avoid potential public backlash.

The firm does not now engage in human cloning activities, Xu said, adding that it has to be “self-restrained” because of possible adverse reaction. However, Xu believes that attitudes may soon change, allowing them to perform human experiments in the future. They have teamed up with South Korean company Sooam, who are working on a project to bring the woolly mammoth back to life after being extinct for 10,000 years, and are working on a commercial project to bring deceased pets back to life for $100,000. Currently, it is offering the market a service of recreating dead pet dogs. However, Xu is optimistic that views can change, and that cloning will become normalized as we begin to think differently about certain social constructs, such as families with two same-sex parents or single parenthood.