As more and more technological advances rear their heads in the news, the fact that the future is just around the corner, if not even here, is becoming more and more certain. Advances in all types of technologies that would have once been considered sci-fi are now being made every day, and the future once imagined by authors like Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke is now our present. Well, to stay in tune with the future thematic, China is to begin mass cow cloning for human consumption.
The food shortage dilemma
As the World’s population is seeing a constant increase, the food available for the increasing number of people is decreasing. Sure, it may not seem like it, with millions of tons of food being thrown away daily, but it is most certainly a process that is taking place.
This is most obvious in places with larger populations, like China and India. And people are aware of this. For example, the first genetically modified organism, a salmon, was approved for consumption last week, causing controversies all over the world.
The process and resources of cloning
So, China thought, if we have the resources to produce more food for fewer expenses, why not go for it?
The factory is planned to be opened in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin, and plans to clone over one million cows by 2020. A bunch of go-getters, aren’t they?
This happened as a result of China’s huge beef supply, which can no longer be handled by its own farmers. They even started a contract importing cows from Australia, and even though it will remain valid until the facility is finished next summer, China will cancel it when they’ll be able to produce their own beef, as it proved to be overly expensive.
The Chinese company will hire experts from the Peking University’s Institute of Molecular Medicine, the Tianjin Biomedical Academy, as well as from the South Korean Biotech Foundation. The facility will finished this summer, and it plans on producing 100,000 cows in the first year.
Moral and ethical concerns
The heads behind the company also claimed that they have the resources to clone primates and even humans, but that they refrain from doing that due to ethical concerns.
They have also experimented with cloning horses, pets, and even primates, mostly for scientific purposes. They did claim, however, that they eventually plan on starting more intense research on human cloning, but not in the very near future.
Image source: Flickr
