China: Industrial Scale Pig Cloning
January 18th, 2014…In an old shoe factory.
Via: BBC:
You hear the squeals of the pigs long before reaching a set of long buildings set in rolling hills in southern China.
Feeding time produces a frenzy as the animals strain against the railings around their pens. But this is no ordinary farm.
Run by a fast-growing company called BGI, this facility has become the world’s largest centre for the cloning of pigs.
The technology involved is not particularly novel – but what is new is the application of mass production.
…
Some of the animals are clones of clones. Most have been genetically modified.
The point of the work is to use pigs to test out new medicines. Because they are so similar genetically to humans, pigs can serve as useful “models”. So modifying their genes to give them traits can aid that process.
One batch of particularly small pigs has had a growth gene removed – they stopped growing at the age of one. Others have had their DNA tinkered with to try to make them more susceptible to Alzheimer’s.
Back at the company headquarters, a line of technicians is hunched over microscopes. This is a BGI innovation: replacing expensive machines with people. It’s called “handmade cloning” and is designed to make everything quicker and easier.
The scientist in charge, Dr Yutao Du, explains the technique in a way that leaves me reeling.
“We can do cloning on a very large scale,” she tells me, “30-50 people together doing cloning so that we can make a cloning factory here.”
A cloning factory – an incredible notion borrowed straight from science fiction. But here in Shenzhen, in what was an old shoe factory, this rising power is creating a new industry.
Research Credit: conceptualdecay
