China ‘cloning factory’ to produce cattle, racehorses and pets

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/12013158/China-cloning-factory-to-produce-cattle-racehorses-and-pets.html

by bootload • 11 years ago

32 27 11 years ago

telegraph.co.uk

jbob20004• 11 years ago

What's more impressive is that China can build a cloning factory for ~$30mil CAD, yet it costs us ~$20mil to build a small pedestrian bridge.

http://www.cp24.com/news/city-unveils-designs-for-19-7-milli...

toomuchtodo• 11 years ago

China's economy is teetering near recession; labor and materials are super cheap at the moment, except for perhaps domain-specific equipment (which China may simply be copying from competitors).

jbob20004• 11 years ago

No doubt, but what does it say about the Canadian economy? Slapping a couple steel girders together for pedestrians costs $20 million? How can we get anything done if something so simple is so expensive?

mfringel• 11 years ago

What it sounds like you're saying is "I believe I know how a bridge is built, but I have no idea what a cloning factory entails, so the latter is more impressive."

jbob20004• 11 years ago

Fair enough! I figure a cloning factory requires some expensive machinery and electronics, notwithstanding already expensive things like climate control, power, and lighting. And it's not like people have built cloning factories before, so you can't exactly look up plans on the internet. By comparison, bridges are fairly well understood and much simpler.

Steko• 11 years ago

Two bridges and as pedestrian bridges go, I wouldn't describe that design as small.

sageikosa• 11 years ago

Very few safety, industrial, or environmental regulations; and for those that might exists, if you know somebody you can get around them.

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

While I agree this is kind of a silly comparison, my brother-in-law has shown using historical records of various infrastructure projects that the real cost of building things (roads, sewers, bridges, Etc.) has in fact gone up over time rather than down as everything else has. He attributes that rise by misalignment between the interests of the tax payer, the government funding agencies, and the engineering companies that do the work.

cyorir• 11 years ago

Just want to point out that they are partnering with Sooam, Hwang Woo-Suk's company. They'll need to avoid his reputation for fraud ethics violations.

siscia3• 11 years ago

I believe we are going in the wrong direction.

The point should not to have more cattle, but to produce food in a more sustainable way.

In my opinion they should aim to produce meat in vitro.

roghummal• 11 years ago

These people are working on cloning, other people are working on in vitro meat. There are still plenty of problems to solve in either process.

siscia3• 11 years ago

Definitely, but one problem will bring more value to people than the other, which one ? It depends.

It depends on what is your time horizont, it depends on your values, it depends on your actual problem right now.

What I said, is that, in my humble opinion, from my perspective, is more valuable to work on a way to make meat sustainable and affordable for all than to work on cloning.

avar• 11 years ago

I'm having a hard time following this line of thought. Cattle was around in some shape before what you could describe as modern humans existed. They need plants that grow naturally and are sustained by the sun and some land. It's clearly a sustainable process.

To the extent that it's not it might be improved by genetic engineering, and I doubt that producing the same meat in vitro will be a net improvement in sustainability for a long time. Now you've replaced a natural organism that needs some fodder and produces CO^2 with an entire factory, employees to manage it etc.

Why do you think that's more sustainable? One of those processes relies on non-technology that existed before there were even humans around, and the other needs high-tech that we don't even have yet.

siscia3• 11 years ago

The point is that we, as human kind, are growing at an exponential rate and if every single human consume as much meat as people do in the west there is not enough land to grow all that meat.

We can solve this in two way, or we stop eating meat or we start growing meat in a more sustainable way.

The problem is not something to look in the future, but it is something really tangible, to have an idea of the order of magnitude I will post here a strip for xkcd[1]

The "efficiency" of a cow is really low, it is estimate[2] that half of the energy you put into a cow is necessary just to keep it alive.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1338/

[2] http://www.angusjournal.com/ArticlePDF/1095_OptimumCow.pdf

3327• 11 years ago

I think StormTroppers are the better investment.

suprjami• 11 years ago

RePet is now a reality. Get your ass to Mars, get your ass to Mars, get your ass to Mars...

cpeterso• 11 years ago

What is the value of cloning livestock? You still need to raise them from calves. Is cloning more economical than traditional animal husbandry? Cloned livestock also increases health risks from reduced genetic variance.

kanzure• 11 years ago

Cloned livestock also increases health risks from reduced genetic variance.

Like, "animal husbandry can manage genetic variation, but cloning can't" ? Doesn't add up. In both cases you can have humans in the loop to make sure sufficiently diverse samples are preserved and used in populations.

All livestock populations should be genetically monitored, anyway.

mc32• 11 years ago

I wonder how this will affect the South Korean pet cloning industry and whether they'll improve on viability of the clones.

eimai134• 11 years ago

We have plenty of pets already who don't have homes. The last thing we need to do is clone more.

Falling3• 11 years ago

Plenty of pets and plenty of livestock. The xkcd biomass graph is a great example of how unnecessary this kind of thing is.

muddi900• 11 years ago

Not only that purebred pets are genetically inferior to mutts/runts.

China ‘cloning factory’ to produce cattle, racehorses and pets

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