The research and design company Boyalife Group and its subsidiaries are currently working on plans to build the largest cloning factory in the world in Tianjin, China. In a recent interview with AFP, the chief executive of the project, Xu Xiaochun, said that the new facility will be advanced enough to clone humans, and the only reason he will refrain from doing just that is the fear of a negative public reaction.

That's not to say the facility won't be used for some aggressive research in DNA replication. Boyalife plans to break ground in the next seven months and have a fully operational plant by 2020. The company aims to clone a million cows per year to supplement the Chinese beef industry, and an onsite gene bank will have space for about five million cell samples stored in liquid nitrogen. The factory will use these samples to create cloned dogs, both as pets and for law enforcement, as well as other mammals such as race horses.

As for humans, Xiaochun thinks the Tianjin factory could be used for replication when public sentiment becomes more accepting of the technology (he points to changing ideas about homosexuality as an example of evolving social values).

"Unfortunately, currently, the only way to have a child is to have it be half its mum, half its dad," he says. "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. This is only a choice."

Genetic engineering is a related field that China is aggressively pursuing, and another technology that has people concerned about human applications. Boyalife has discussed combining cloning technology with gene-editing techniques to create super cows that provide more meat.

Today, researchers from the United States, Great Britain, and China began an international summit to discuss appropriate applications for gene-editing. Even though the hard questions are being addressed, politicians are struggling to come up with legislation to properly regulate genetic engineering and cloning technologies.

Boyalife Group's South Korean partner, Sooam Biotech, touts the new Tianjin facility as a safeguard for biodiversity where endangered species' DNA can be safely stored. They are already working on a project to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction using cells preserved in Siberian permafrost. The Korean research company also offers their services to clone dead dogs so grief-stricken pet owners can restore their best friends to life, sort of. (Instructions for preserving your dog's carcass can be found on their website's homepage.)

Human cloning is one of the rare instances when scientists are encouraged to not pursue the limits of available technology, and are even prevented entirely in some cases. But if Xiaochun is right about the future, cloning humans might one day seem as normal as breeding dogs. We have to figure out what we are going to allow this technology to be used for soon, because it's real, and it's here.

Source: AFP

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