Cloning, 21st Century: An earthly odyssey

Now here is something that won’t allow room for indifference. Half a year ago I read an article regarding the growing cloning technology. It exposed how cloning was trying to get a foot in the food industry and how, up to some extent, was already present on it. But the article went a lot deeper by hinting that certain Asian country (China) was experimenting with human cloning. The cited article was the target of substantial mocking for those statements. Comments such as: “…now I have the plot for my new Sci-Fi novel”, marked the post as alarmist, out of reality and lacking real evidence. The fact is that this same month, Xu Xiaochun, CEO of BoyaLife, a “replication factory”, as they call it, declared that they now have the technology to go the extra step, cloning humans.

 "Dolly clone" by Squidonius
 

For those who don’t yet know exactly how cloning works: is pretty much creating an embryo with the same DNA from a specific donor. You may say is like installing the same program to a different computer, the only difference is that the computer grows and develops exactly the same as the original. What may look such a complicated task, at its core, is a very intuitive process.

Lots of people haven’t realized that cloning is a growing technology that is, and will be, part of our daily lives sooner or later. Human cloning could potentially “grow” receptive organs for everyone, breaking a new barrier for medical science. Thinking in lucrative terms, it would be hugely profitable for a company to be able to offer cloned copies of deceased pets. Think about the money that moves around such emotional value added in an exact replica of a beloved pet. Already, BoyaLife’s biggest plant, located in the city of Tianjin, is expected to be cloning one million cows annually by 2020. Of course the main concern with this matter is the moral implications of the endeavor (playing God). Knowing this, Xiaochun stated that "self-restraint" was the policy to follow.

BoyaLife plant in Tianjin, China. Source: BoyaLife

The ruling opinion is that Boyalife won’t start making clones right away, and that’s where they may be wrong. Chinese culture has a different placement for moral restrictions, not that they have no moral, but just a different view on it (this is a country that issued restrictions to families with more than one child). In 2005, the UN General Assembly adopted a position against the cloning of human beings and the Chinese representative voted against the Declaration, saying that different countries varied in their understanding of the text’s inherent moral, ethical and religious aspects. Even when the allegedly law passed, it is not free of exploitable loopholes.

Here is where I get my feet wet without any proof to back me up, I think Boyalife has already made a human cloning experiment. This is a company that has admitted all of this because of outside pressure, and I’m sure they are way more into it that they will ever tell.

If they did, or will actually clone a human being, it won’t be the first. In 2002, a project called “Clonaid” did what many consider the first official human clone, a female named Eve. This whole project is linked to the Raëlian movement (which I will most likely write about in the future). They claimed human cloning will “open a path to immortality.”

There’s no real evidence of the whole BoyaLife’s program to clone humans. All we have is an obscure company, in an already obscure country, saying that they have the ability to clone humans but won’t use it. Well, what could possibly go wrong?