The Chinese scientist responsible for the world's first cloning facility in the northern port city of Tianjin, China, announced that they're ready to clone humans. The biggest cloning factory in the world will open its doors in seven months and is set to clone one million cows by 2020. Police dogs, racehorses and other animals are also lined up for cloning.
Boyalife Group, the company fueling the cloning facility is in collaboration with South Korean company, Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, which is currently developing the duplication of beloved, deceased pets and woolly mammoths.
Cloning deceased pets for their grief-stricken owners proved to be a lucrative endeavor. Some people are willing to pay around $100,000 to bring back deceased pets as clones. The two companies are also collaborating with the Chinese Academy of Sciences for the development of primate clones.
"The technology is already there. If this is allowed, I don't think there are other companies better than Boyalife that make better technology," said Boyalife Group CEO Xu Xiaochun who expressed concerns about ethical issues that can potentially block the project.
Xu hopes that the general public will edit their views and allow the research to push forward. The 44-year-old CEO explained that currently, a child is born from half of the father's genes and half from the mother's genes. Xu is optimistic that perhaps in the future, parents will have three choices: a child could either share 50-50 of the parents' genes, 100 percent from the father's genes or 100 percent from the mother's genes.
Xu aims to debunk the common myths and misconceptions about cloning experiments. He wants the general public to realize that the cloning experiment is not 'crazy' and that the scientists doing the cloning are not 'weird'.
Xu, who attended a university in the U.S. and Canada, previously worked for Pfizer, an American pharmaceutical company. He expressed that social views are prone to change, taking into example people's view on homosexuality. He is hopeful that the general public's views on cloning will also change and that humans can be presented with more reproduction choices in the future through cloning.
Photo: Danny Cain | Flickr
