World’s largest cloning factory to produce cattle, police dogs and pets

The world’s largest animal cloning factory is under construction in China, with plans to churn out dogs, horses and up to a million beef cattle a year, reports said, prompting online and scientific concerns. The 200-million-yuan ($31-million) facility will include cloning laboratories and a gene bank, the official Xinhua news agency reported. It is being set up by Chinese biotechnology firm Boyalife and South Korea’s Sooam Biotech – whose founder was embroiled in controversy a decade ago over claims to have cloned human embryos – along with two Chinese research institutions. China has been cloning animals since 2000, Xinhua said, four years after the birth in Scotland of Dolly, the world’s first cloned sheep.

Is this meat going to be sold in South Korea or China? If in China, please make our leaders eat it first.

One online observer

It will develop animals such as pet and police dogs, racehorses and cows, to be sold on the open market on an industrial scale. The factory in the northern port of Tianjin is set to start production next year, with initial capacity of 100,000 cattle embryos a year, growing to one million. Zhu Yi, a professor of food science at China Agricultural University, said there would be “almost no difference” between cloned and real cattle, but that companies should not rush to put cloned meat on the table without “rigorous risk assessments and repeated experiments”.

Insane. There are already enough stray dogs at the moment, so many that the unclaimed ones are euthanised. What will be done with so many more?

Another social media commentator

Science China cloning