Beiruting News

The Chinese now have the ability to clone humans in the biggest cloning factory in the country.

Boyalife Group and its partners are constructing a huge plant in Tianjin, the Chinese port city, where they plan to produce a million cloned cows every year by 2020, and chief executive Xu Xiaochun has eyes on human cloning, according to a Newsmax report.

The only reason they haven't done it yet is concerns about public reaction, but the technology definitely exists, according to the report.

The factory will be quite the workhorse when it comes to cloning in the coming years, with not just cows being produced but also thoroughbred racehorses and police dogs. In addition, Boyalife has been working with South Korean company Sooam as well as the Chinese Academy of Sciences on the project to improve the cloning of primates for disease research.

Boyalife wouldn't need to go much farther to start working on humans. It hasn't done so yet, but only because the company is keeping itself from doing so over concerns about public backlash, Xu said according to the report.

Instead, he's waiting on social values to change. The world has already seen growing acceptance of homosexuality, so perhaps people's minds are being changed about human reproduction.

For example, perhaps in the future people want the DNA from three people instead of just half from dad and half from mom. Or perhaps someone might want it to be half from dad and half from the other dad. Or perhaps even someone could desire the genetics to come completely from the dad or from the mom.

But human cloning remains a thorny subject that is likely to face intense backlash, and Xu knows it.

The companies are certainly ambitious when it comes to cloning. Sooam, Boyalife's partner, has been working on a project to return the woolly mammoth from extinction using cloning cells preserved in Siberian permafrost.