Sometime in the next year, a company called Boyalife Genomics will open a massive factory in the coastal Chinese city of Tianjin, where it plans to clone 100,000 cattle per year—a way to address the Middle Kingdom’s rising appetite for beef. Eventually, the company aims to clone 1 million cattle a year, as well as other animals like champion racehorses and drug-sniffing dogs.
Cloned humans—or as Boyalife’s founder Xiao-Chun Xu calls them, “Frankensteins”—are not on the menu. Not yet.
Xu’s ultramodern factory—its layout is bigger than three football fields—is the latest manifestation of the sci-fi cloning craze that’s seen members of a Florida nonprofit try to clone a 2000-year-old tree, and a South Korean company clone two puppies in an attempt to reincarnate a British couple’s beloved dead dog.
Of course, scraping bark from a tree or sending in a vial of your dog’s DNA is far different from churning out 100,000 identical cattle. That level of efficiency, and speed is unprecedented, and Xu hopes it will change the future of animal reproduction.
The Chinese-born doctor, with a Ph.D. from Washington University and an MBA from Emory, is part nerdy scientist, part businessman, with that rare combination of brains and street smarts. After working as a project manager at Pfizer, he moved back to China where, in 2009, he founded a massive stem-cell database with the help of seven research institutes.
Three years later, Xu founded Boyalife Group, a $2 billion venture with four locations and 22 subsidiaries—the newest is Boyalife Genomics. While acting as founder and CEO of Boyalife, Xu is also an adjunct professor of molecular medicine at Peking University, where he’s heralded as an expert in everything from arthritis to oncology.
Prior to the announcement of his new cloning factory, the 44-year-old Xu had remained out of the global spotlight. But with the news that his Tianjin venture hopes to clone more mammals in a year than humanity has managed to clone in the previous 200,000, his phone has started ringing off the hook.
Cloning, or asexual reproduction, is a naturally occurring phenomenon in nature. A number of plants, bacteria, and single-celled organisms reproduce this way. Fungi, for example, split in two; strawberries grow clones of themselves on their stems.
Artificial cloning, which Xu’s team will use to make cattle, is decidedly more complicated. The science world recognizes three types of cloning: genetic, therapeutic, and reproductive. It’s the last one that’s used to clone whole animals, through a process called nuclear transfer.
To do this, researchers replace the DNA from a new cell with that of an animal they intend to clone. Eventually the modified egg is placed inside an adult female who later gives birth to the clone. While researchers reportedly cloned frogs as early as the 1950s, scientists weren’t able to successfully clone a mammal until decades later.
It was three scientists at the University of Edinburgh who achieved the feat, with the birth of a cloned sheep in 1996—the only one to succeed out of 277 attempts to live. The clone was named Dolly because it was made from the cell of a mammary gland and the researchers “couldn’t think of a more impressive pair than Dolly Parton’s.”
In the next four years, cloning as a science took off, with researchers producing successful clones of a Rhesus monkey, cow, goat, and more. Today a number of companies exist to clone animals, with some focused on farm livestock like bulls and cows, and others on an increasingly big business: family dogs.
The largest of these companies, Sooam Biotech, has reportedly cloned 700 puppies since opening in 2004. The South Korean firm actually paired with Xu to create Boyalife Genomics, but in an email to The Daily Beast...
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