Now, a new commercial venture in Tianjin, China, plans to clone 100,000 beef cattle a year for meat production beginning in the first half of 2016.
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Xu Xiaochun, board chairman of Boyalife Group, one of the companies behind the venture, told reporters that cloning technology is “already around us, it’s just that not everyone knows about it” and that numerous strawberries and bananas sold in Chinese supermarkets are produced using this technology. However, cloning humans comes with a broad scope of ethical and moral dilemmas that modern society may not yet be willing to face. His only fear is that the society is not ready to accept this, he told AFP. But with our cloning factory, we choose to do so now.
Plans to build the cloning factory were revealed earlier in November by the Chinese company Boyalife Group. The Sooam company is involved in cloning woolly mammoths to bring an extinct species back to life and “reviving” family pets with identical clones. He was considered to be on the forefront of cloning research, until his claims that he cloned a human embryo were discredited and he was sacked from his university position. Xiaochun and his team are afraid that cloning humans could result in a major backlash, including protests and possibly even legal ramifications.
“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.
Boyalife CEO Xu Xiaochun says they’re already working on cloning primates, and from there, he says it’s a short leap to cloning humans, although he says they’re not working on any human cloning activities right now. BoyaLife was first to report the news in an official statement.
China-based biotech company Boyalife and the Korean Sooam Biotech are the two companies that would run the $31 million facility.
But social values can change, he pointed out, citing changing views of homosexuality and suggesting that in time humans could have more choices about their own reproduction.
Prior to this, cloning in China had been limited to scientific research.
“Unfortunately, currently, the only way to have a child is to have it be half its mum, half its dad”, said Xiaochan.
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“Maybe in the future you have three choices instead of one, you either have fifty-fifty, or you have a choice of having the genetics 100 percent from Daddy or 100 percent from Mummy”.
