GETTY A cloning factory will open in China by the end of the year

The ambitious and futuristic facility hopes to be mass-producing one million cows every 12 months by 2020. Not only will it clone cattle, but the factory, which will be located in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, will also cater to more specific needs by genetically engineering police dogs and thoroughbred race horses.

GETTY The scientists will mass-produce livestock for meat

It is part of a $21m plan which is backed by the Boyalife group in collaboration with South Korean company Sooam Biotech Research Foundation. Xu Xiaochun, CEO of Boyalife, said: “Everything in the supermarket looks good – it’s almost all shiny, good-looking, and uniformly shaped. For animals, we weren’t able to do that in the past. “But with our cloning factory, we choose to do so now.

GETTY Questions of ethics have risen about cloning

"The technology is already there. "If this is allowed. I don't think there are other companies better than Boyalife that make better technology.” While ethical questions are bound to rise, the US’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said that “meat and milk from cow, pig, and goat clones and the offspring of any animal clones are as safe as food we eat every day.”

GETTY It will bring pets back to life

There are currently no plans in the pipeline to clone and produce humans in a bid to eradicate disease, but Xiaochun has said that this can change if people become more open to the idea of it. He said: "Unfortunately, currently, the only way to have a child is to have it be half its mum, half its dad. "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. “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.” Inside the factory will be a 15,000 square metre laboratory, an animal centre and a gene bank.