Chinese Factory Mass Produces Cloned Pigs

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By Alex Magdaleno2014-01-20 05:13:36 UTC

As if glowing green pigs from China weren't odd enough, now a Chinese cloning facility that produces 500 cloned pigs a year is proving that science fiction is becoming ever more real.

The UK's BBC recently went on a tour of the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), the world’s largest center for pig cloning. Revealed in the televised report are scores of sheds, sometimes up to 90 in a row, housing normal-looking pigs that have been cloned at the facility.

“We can do cloning on a very large scale,” Dr. Yutao Du told the BBC. “30-50 people [clone] so that we can make a cloning factory here.”

Although animal cloning isn't a novel idea, BGI produces its cloned pigs through a method called “handmade cloning.” BGI replaces machines with people in order to cut down costs and supposedly make the process quicker.

In a non-air conditioned room next to the pens, doctors perform surgery on sows (female pigs). They put the pigs to sleep using anesthesia and use a fiber optic probe to locate the uterus. Then they retrieve a small test tube from a refrigerator containing blastocysts (early stage embryos prepared in a lab) to be implanted into a sow.

The point of BGI’s work is to use the pigs to test out new medicines because pigs are genetically similar to humans. To that end, BGI modifies the pigs’ genes to give them traits that would make them serve as better models for the medicine testing. Some of the pigs have had growth genes removed and others have had their DNA tinkered with to make them more prone to diseases like Alzheimer’s.

BGI also specializes in gene sequencing, or the process of determining the order of nucleotides in a DNA molecule. The company also claims to have largest center for gene sequencing, with a total of 156 gene sequencing machines analyzing DNA codes.

"If it tastes good you should sequence it," BGI chief executive Wang Jun told the BBC when asked about how he decides what to sequence. "You should know what's in the genes of that species. A third category is if it looks cute - anything that looks cute: panda, polar bear, penguin, you should really sequence it - it's like [digitalizing] all the wonderful species.”

Cataloging all that's tasty and cute in nature, or an animal rights activist's worst nightmare?

Jun told the BBC that BGI leans toward to the former, saying "[W]e're following Nature - there are lots of people dying from hunger and protein supply so we have to think about ways of dealing with that, for example exploring the potential of rice as a species."

What's more, the BGI company cafeteria uses some of the products from the labs — from pigs to yogurt — in order to stress the impact the company's cloning and gene sequencing work can have on the life of an ordinary person.

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Topics: china, clone, medicine, pigs, US & World, World

Image: Flickr, Stephen & Claire Farnsworth