It’s been almost 20 years since the work of Scottish scientists Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell led to the birth of Dolly the sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal. News of the breakthrough rippled like a shockwave, provoking both enthusiasm and outrage. The biggest concern? That we might do the same with humans. In the two decades that followed, many other mammals were conceived through cloning, to such an extent that the South Korean company Sooam, created in 2006, now offers wealthy dog owners the chance to clone their pets after their deaths — for $100,000. But humans themselves seemed sheltered from it, until now. Not so much because of ethical reasons, but because of technical ones. Geneticists hit a brick wall every time they tried to make such a “nuclear transfer” into a human being. That’s no longer the case. A few weeks ago, Chinese doctor Xu Xiaochun said some things that would send shivers down anybody’s spine. He is CEO of Boyalife, a company that has invested $31 million in a Tianjin factory to produce 100,000 cloned cattle embryos per year to meet Chinese demand. “The technology is already there,” Xu said. “If human cloning is allowed, I don’t think any other company will be in a better position than Boyalife to make it happen.” He didn’t stop there. “Unfortunately,” he continued, “the only way to have a child currently is to have it be half its mom, half its dad. Maybe in the future you have three choices instead of one. You either have 50-50, or you have a choice of having the genetics 100% from the dad or 100% from the mom.” Wow. (READ MORE)
