The Chinese scientist who headed the development of the world's largest cloning factory, which will clone everything from cows and police dogs to racehorses, says he is now properly equipped to clone humans, according to RT. The facility is set to open some time in the next seven months, with the goal of cloning approximately one million cows by the year 2020, according to Yahoo! News.
"Everything in the supermarket looks good - it's almost all shiny, good-looking, and uniformly shaped," said Xu Xiaochun, CEO of the the Boyalife group, the company behind the factory. "For animals, we weren't able to do that in the past. But with our cloning factory, we choose to do so now."
Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, the South Korean company that is collaborating with the Boyalife group, has already had success in cloning wooly mammoths as well as dead pets. In fact, the market for dead pets is enjoying great success, with some people willing to pay up to $100,000 to bring their deceased pet back to life.
Although Xiaochan says that the technology to clone humans is ready to go, he says that due to a potential ethical backlash the company is taking its time.
"The technology is already there," he said. "If this is allowed, I don't think there are other companies better than Boyalife that make better technology."
Despite the bold claims of the Boyalife group, Han Lanzhi, a GMO safety specialist at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, believes that Boyalifie's claims regarding cloning animals for meat production are implausible, according to the Daily Mail. Only time will tell whether or not the company's claims surrounding human cloning will be backed up.
"Unfortunately, currently, the only way to have a child is to have it be half its mum, half its dad," said Xiaochan. "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."
