Zheping Huang of Quartz has a concise report about what looks to be a significant growth industry in China: the cloning business. This type of science will ultimately have a profound effect on the future of the world’s food and medicine supply, though it’s attended by many ethical questions. A few points:

• If we can clone meat and end slaughterhouses, that would be great. GMOs and cloned foods (plants, especially) will be needed in the future to deal with climate change, and anyone appalled by humans eating “unnatural foods” should stroll through their local supermarket and read product ingredients, especially for the indestructible Twinkies.
• Livestock cloned to be prone to disease to test medicines is troubling, though no more than those bred that way through standard animal husbandry.
• It may seem a colossal waste that wealthy people would spend $100k to make a (rough) duplicate of a beloved pet, but these luxury spenders are helping to subsidize the science in a way that may benefit many others.

The opening:

A fast-growing Chinese biotechnology company is to build a cloning factory to copy dogs, cows, racing horses, non-human primates, and other animals, state news agency Xinhua (link in Chinese) reports.

The so-called “world’s largest cloning factory” (yes, there are several more) will include a cloning production line, a cloned animal center, a gene bank, and a science and education exhibition hall, Boyalife Group announced Nov. 22. It will be located in the city of Tianjin, which was the site of a deadly, costly industrial accident earlier this year, in the special development zone where the explosion was. 

Production is expected to start in 2016, after a 200 million yuan ($31 million) investment. The first animal to come down the line will be Japanese cows, in an attempt to lower the price of high-quality beef in the Chinese market, Dr. Xu Xiaochun, chairman and CEO of Boyalife, told Chinese media (link in Chinese). “[We are] now promoting cloned cows and cloned horses to improve China’s modern animal husbandry industry,” Xu said.•