China ‘clone factory’ scientist eyes human replication

Boyalife, its partners are building the giant plant in Chinese port of Tianjin, where it is due to go into production within the next seven months

Beijing: The Chinese scientist behind the world’s biggest cloning factory has technology advanced enough to replicate humans, he told AFP, and is only holding off for fear of the public reaction.
Boyalife Group and its partners are building the giant plant in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, where it is due to go into production within the next seven months and aims for an output of one million cloned cows a year by 2020.
 

But cattle are only the beginning of chief executive Xu Xiaochun’s ambitions.
 

In the factory pipeline are also thoroughbred racehorses, as well as pet and police dogs, specialised in searching and sniffing.
 

Boyalife is already working with its South Korean partner Sooam and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to improve primate cloning capacity to create better test animals for disease research.

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

“The technology is already there,” Xu said. “If this is allowed, I don’t think there are other companies better than Boyalife that make better technology.”

Boyalife’s South Korean partner Sooam is already working on a project to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction by cloning cells preserved for thousands of years in the Siberian permafrost.

For now, Xu seeks to become the world’s first purveyor of “cloned” beef, breeding genetically identical super-cattle that he promises will taste like Kobe and allow butchers to “slaughter less and produce more” to meet the demands of China’s booming middle class.

There is controversy over whether cloned beef is safe for human consumption — research by the US Food and Drug Adminstration says that it is, but the European parliament has backed a ban on cloned animals and products in the food chain.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has yet to review the issue.

Han Lanzhi, a GMO safety specialist at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said Boyalife’s claims about the safety, scope and timeline of their operations were alarming — and implausible.

“To get approval for the safety of cloned animals would be a very drawn-out process, so when I heard this news, I felt very surprised,” she said.

“There must be strong regulation because as a company pursuing its own interests, they could very easily do other things in the future,” she added.

Xu sought to be reassuring, telling AFP: “We want the public to see that cloning is really not that crazy, that scientists aren’t weird, dressed in lab coats, hiding behind a sealed door doing weird experiments.”