Boyalife Group, a “cloning factory” considered as one of the biggest in the world has the technology that is advanced enough to replicate humans. This was claimed by a Chinese scientist and the only reason why it has not done so is because they fear adverse public reaction.
Boyalife Group is currently building a huge factory at Tianjin, China and is scheduled it production to go online within the next seven months. The cloning factory aims to have an output of one million cloned cows by the year 2020.
Xu Xiachun, chief executive disclosed that cattle is the first step, on the horizon is the cloning of throughbred horses for racing, police dogs and even pets.
Boyalife Group is collaborating with its South Korean partner Sooam and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to upgrade its primate cloning so that better laboratory animals can be created 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."
The firm does not currently engage in human cloning activities, Xu said, adding that it has to be "self-restrained" because of possible adverse reaction.
Citing the changing social and even moral dysnamics, Xu cited the perception on homosexuality and that there will come a time when more choices can be given to humans when it comes to the subject of their own reproduction.
"Unfortunately, currently, the only way to have a child is to have it be half its mum, half its dad," he said.
"Maybe in the future you have three choices instead of one," he went on. "You either have fifty-fifty, or you have a choice of having the genetics 100 percent from Daddy or 100 percent from Mummy. This is only a choice."
Xu, 44, went to university in Canada and the US, and has previously worked for US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and in drug development.
Citing that cloning is a safeguard to biodiversity itself, the Tianjin factory will be the location of a gene bank where up to five million cell samples will be held, frozen in liquid nitrogen. These cell samples belongs to the world’s endangered species, a genetic catalog that will be maintained for the future generations.
Sooam, the South Korean partner of Boyalife is already working on a project that will clone a woolly mammoth and bring it back from extinction by cloning cells found in the Siberian permafrost where it was preserved for thousands of years.
Source: Agence France Press
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