China building world’s largest animal cloning factory

That would make BoyaLife by far the largest clone factory in the world.

Xiao-Chun Xu, the CEO of Boyalife stated that at the moment they are hoping to produce some 100,000 cow embryos every year and contribute about 5% of premium cattle in China.

Chinese scientists have already been cloning sheep, cattle and pigs for as many as 15 years.

BoyaLife, the company partnered with South Korea’s Sooam Biotech and creating the 14,000 square-metre facility in Tianjin, said the focus of its work would be cloning gcattle to keep up with Chinese demand for the meat.

Xu said that they were building something which didn’t exist earlier. Xu also added that this is going to help save many critically endangered species and that is one target of theirs as well.

Stuart Ashworth, head of economic services at Quality Meat Scotland, said there were significant hurdles to the ethical acceptance of meat produced from cloned animals, including inside China.

The world’s largest animal cloning factory under construction in Tianjin in northern China is 80 per cent complete and is likely to be brought on stream in the first half of next year, a news website reported, citing the factory’s major investor. “But in the area of cloning, I think we are going the wrong way and starting to kill the technology”. “So we are very, very excited about it”. He likened the process to “pouring a glass of orange juice into another empty glass”, implying that the cloned product will be an exact copy of the original one.

Prior to this, cloning in China had been limited to scientific research, however, it reports that more and more companies have shown interest in investing in the technology for commercial use, especially animal husbandry. The Food Standards Agency in 2010 investigated beef coming from the offspring of a cow cloned in the USA entering the food chain. It also emphasized the impact of the process on increasing deaths across several stages of development.

In September the European parliament backed a ban on cloning animals for food, and the halting of imports and products derived from them.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration ruled cloned animals as safe to eat.

The facility’s main activity will be cloning cattle.