Why BoyaLife plan to clone farm animals will lead to cloning Humans

“We are going [down] a path that no one has ever travelled. We are building something that has not existed in the past.”

BoyaLife CEO Xu Xiaochun on his company’s plans to clone meat producing animals

Leave it to China to come up with this controversial idea!

Faced with a coming demand for meat in the future, a company called BoyaLife back in November 2015 had decided to clone meat producing animals as reported in the article “China is building a controversial animal cloning facility to satisfy rising meat demands”, published November 30, 2015 By Rick Stella, Digitaltrends.

 

BoyaLife CEO Xu Xiaochun is clearly pumped about the prospects of his company making money, quote: “This is going to change our world and our lives. It is going to make our life better. So we are very, very excited about it.”

#Boyalife Group News# World's largest animal cloning center to be built in Tianjin by Boyalife Group . pic.twitter.com/3jSHtYurOa

— Boyalife Group (@BoyalifeGroup) December 14, 2015

Their planned US$31 million facility, which will be the largest such facility in existence, is currently under construction 100 miles from China's capital of Beijing.  BoyaLife aims to not only clone meat producing animals like cows and lamb but also clone endangered animals.

BoyaLife intends to raise around 100,000 on their 14,000 square feet cloning facility. They also plan to make addition money from the cloning of champion horses and drug-sniffing dogs and plant to start operation in the Third Quarter of 2016.

So why are they cloning meat producing animals if cloning prized animals is already an acceptable practice?

BoyaLife to clone meat-producing farm animals - China's meat consumption on the rise

China consumes a lot of meat, consuming some 70 million tons of meat each year, surpassing the United States’ 32 million tons. This is due to the effects of Westernization, which translates to Chinese becoming hooked on meat, eating more processed Fast foods that contain meat than ever before.

They consume far less meat per capita than most countries with Australia taking that crown for top meat eating nation in 2013 as noted in my blog article entitled “United Nations Population Division says 11.2 billion people by 2100 - Why Africa and India Population exploding as Insect Meat is coming”.

Despite this, China's demand for meat is steadily rising in China and BoyaLife hopes that cloning meat is the answer. So can cloning animals be a solution to the coming global meat shortage?

Cloning and the environment - US and Britain accepting while EU skeptical

Potentially it might, but to the detriment of the environment.

Albeit cloning animals is unethical, putting this aside for ac moment, there are unknown biological problems associated with cloned meat. Animas that are cloned may be susceptible to certain diseases and may even act as host for various new viruses.

They can also potentially cause CJD (Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease) in humans, as it's still not clear how prions can be formed in meat. This fear of cloning animals and GMO 9Genetically Modified Organisms) is part of the reason why the EU (European Union) has banned the sale of clones livestock, their offspring and products derived from them.

While Europe is banning cloned animals, Americans and Brits are getting ready to embrace cloned animals. In 2008, the FDA concluded that meat or milk from cloned cows, pigs, or goats is as safe to eat and is no different from as meat or milk from regular farm animals. Britain followed suit, with the United Kingdom’s Food Standards Agency declaring in 2010 that meat and milk from cloned animals is completely safe.

Cloning Animals for Food – Cloning people to remove genetic abnormalities

Still, strict regulations are in place, with cloned animals not being allowed to be grown free range as in the case of AquaBounty Technologies GMO AquaAdvantage Salmon as reported in my blog article entitled “AquaBounty Technologies GMO AquaAdvantage Salmon – Why GMO Salmon in the Wild will be an Ecological Disaster”.

But could BoyaLife technology be used to clone people? After all, if people are willing to pay to have champion horses and drug-sniffing dogs, why not loved ones about to die? Also they could make money from editing out abnormalities out of the genomes of prospective parents to be using CRISPR-Cas9 (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), making sure their child has no defects or has enhanced abilities, Gattaca and Almost Human Style!

GMO and cloned animals are usually kept in enclosed areas separate from the environment to prevent them escaping into the wild and spreading their genetic information, as mutations due to cross-breeding with these superior animals may have a negative effect on wildlife.

It still remains to be seen if cloned or GMO animals have any real effect on people and the environment. It’ll be even more interesting to see if Boyalife may also turn to cloning humans as well.