The ethics and business of cloning

Safety of cloned animal products key to commercial success

The establishment of a cloning facility may be good news for cattle husbandry. China raises more cows than the US on every acre of agricultural land, but its total dairy production is only half of the latter's; and many similar problems are caused by the nation's lack of good cattle breeds. Cloning could enable China to raise good foreign breeds within the country.

Cloning can benefit the food industry, too. The US Food and Drug Administration recently allowed the entry of trans-genetic salmon into the market. And if trans-genetic food were to play a key role in the development of the food industry, cloning will be its core technology.

In fact, biomedicine can also benefit from cloning. The science of organ transplant is quite advanced, but because of insufficient supply of organs many patients awaiting transplants die every year. Cloning can help solve this problem by "copying" human organs.

It is too early to say the cloning facility in Tianjin will help increase the supply of quality beef because the cost involved will be rather high. In the US, no law prohibits people from selling cloned animals' meat, but nobody does so because it's not deemed profitable.

Besides, Boya Biotech's statement saying it is improving the technology of cloning primates is misleading. Published materials show that scientists can only "produce" an embryo with cells derived from a primate, which does not survive more than a few weeks. So mastering the technology of cloning primates is decades away.

The company's aim of building the facility may be to clone tens of thousands of oxen, but general public resistance to trans-genetic food means it will have a hard time making it a commercial success. Until people are certain about the safety of a new kind of food product, they tend not to accept it. Given this fact, the government may not readily permit cloned animal products to enter the market.

So to exploit cloning for commercial purposes, a company has to first convince the people about the safety of its product, and overcome technological barriers and legal hurdles.

Tang Cheng is a Ph. D. candidate at Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences.