China's Industrial Scale Cloning of Pigs

Scientists in China are cloning pigs on a large scale. One farm run by a company called Beijing Genomics Institute, or BGI reportedly produces 500 cloned pigs annually, making them the largest gene sequencing center and pig cloning factory in the world. Scientists in China are cloning pigs on a large scale. One farm run by a company called Beijing Genomics Institute, or BGI reportedly produces 500 cloned pigs annually, making them the largest pig cloning factory in the world, as well as housing the largest gene sequencing center. Some pigs at BGI are clones of cloned pigs, and many are genetically modified to have certain traits. Because pigs anatomies are similar to humans, scientists use the genetically modified pigs for various kinds of medical research testing. Scientists at BGI have a 70 to 80 percent success rate when it comes to implanting cloned pigs, which they do twice a day. But BGI has larger ambitions to sequence the DNA of a million each of people, animals, and plants. Wang Jun, the chief executive of BGI is quoted as saying: "...we'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." Jun also reportedly said that if an animal is cute or tastes good, scientists should know the genetic sequence of the animal.