China is well-known for grasping an economic opportunity by the horns and going forward, regardless of if it’s the world’s highest bridge or a man-made island. The same can be said of taking advantage of commercial opportunities in genetic editing.
Genetic editing has its opponents and is still considered by many scientists as controversial, but China is going ahead with the science on a very grand scale. The world’s largest cloning laboratory being constructed in the government-sponsored business park in Tianjin, is set to open in mid-2016.
The 14,000 sq. meter facility is being headed up by a China-based biotechnology company, Boyalife Group, in a joint venture with a South Korean company, Sooam Biotech. The site is not too far from where a series of deadly explosions occurred this summer at a chemical warehouse. The initial cost of the facility varies from US$31 million to about US$313 million or 200 million Yuan.
Xu Xiaochun, board chairman of Boyalife Group, told EcoWatch Chinese farmers were struggling to produce enough cattle to meet market demands. A 2014 report said growing global demand for beef will continue to come mainly from China. It should be noted China now relies on beef imports from Australia, the biggest supplier, accounting for 53 percent of total import volume in 2013.
In addition to creating beef cattle embryos, the facility will also clone animals, including drug sniffing dogs, pet dogs and racehorses. The facility will also have a gene storage unit and a museum. “We are going [down] a path that no one has ever travelled,” Xu told The Guardian, as reported by EcoWatch. “We are building something that has not existed in the past.”
“Clone technology is already around us. It’s just that not everyone knows about it,” said Mr. Xu, as reported by Owen Guo at The New York Times. “And I can tell you all that cloned beef is the tastiest beef I have ever had.”
“One reason we have so much low-quality beef is because we haven’t applied clone technology,” said Xu. “This is the only way to allow Chinese and many other people in the world to enjoy high-quality beef in an efficient manner.”
Mr. Xu has some big ambitions. His “phase one” will start with cloning 100,000 cow embryos a year, and eventually work up to one million embryos a year. He added that new technologies will have an “assembly line format” with embryos coming off the line at a rate of less than 1 minute per cell.
China is home to the flag-bearer in biotechnology, BGI, formerly known as Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen. The company employs over 2,000 PhD-level scientists and utilizes 200 top-of-the-range gene-sequencing machines in China, the U.S. and in Denmark. BGI is the world’s largest genomics organization, with the capacity to read, analyse and alter DNA from plants, microbes, humans, and animals.