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China is mass-producing cloned pigsBy Scott Sutherland | Geekquinox – Wed, Jan 15, 2014
Clone factories have always been a staple of science fiction, with gleaming machines in sterile rooms where living organisms are mass-produced by the hundreds. In China, though, this concept has leapt off the page, as they've begun cloning on what could be called 'an industrial scale.'
Gone are the gleaming machines, though, replaced by human workers, and it all takes place in an old shoe factory instead of a sterile laboratory. Still, the company that runs the facility, Beijing Genomics Institute or BGI, is turning out 500 cloned pigs every year, and they have much greater ambitions about sequencing the genomes of millions of different species.
"We can do cloning on a very large scale," said Dr. Yutao Du, one of the researchers at the factory, according to BBC News, "30-50 people together doing cloning so that we can make a cloning factory here."
Dr. Du and her colleagues are producing these pig clones for medical research, since pigs and humans are so close together, genetically. According to the BBC News report, not only are these pigs being cloned, batches of these clones are being tailored for specific research purposes — with their DNA altered so that they don't age or so that they're more susceptible to Alzheimer's disease.
What BGI is doing isn't anything new, though. The techniques and technology are tried and true. They're just doing it all on a bigger scale than anyone else.
This isn't the only 'mass production' that BGI is going for either. According to the report, the company currently has 156 gene sequencing machines — over five times more than Europe's largest sequencing centre — and their ultimate goal is to sequence a million genomes each of people, animals and plants. The species they plan on focusing on? The ones that taste good (the facility's cafeteria is apparently used to test products from the lab), the ones that benefit industry or healthcare, and the ones that are cute.
"[A]nything that looks cute: panda, polar bear, penguin, you should really sequence it — it's like digitalizing all the wonderful species," BGI's chief executive, Wang Jun, told BBC News.
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Post time 17-1-2014 10:27 PM
变色卡
... bukan teknologi clone haiwan x sempurna lagi ker
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