The number of pets owned in China is 130 million. Big changes are happening here in China. A company has appeared in China that provides cloning of dogs and cats. The venture company Beijing Xinuo Valley Biotechnology (Sinogene) will provide the pet clones. The first floor of this facility has a room that newborn clones are raised. More than 10 puppies are making cheerful noises. The two poodles playing with each other are cloned dogs. Poodles, Alaskan Malamutes, and other pairs are raised in this room. The price of a clone is $50,000 (about 7 million yen) for a dog and $40,000 for a cat. Nearly 500 babies have already been born. Of these, dogs account for more than two-thirds of the total.
The company came up with the pet cloning business in 2013. They invited founding members and investors, including cloning experts, and began research and development in 2015. The first cloned dog, Ryuryu, was born in 2017, and in 2018, the business of creating cloned dogs began. Shinogene has approximately 300 employees, half of whom are engineers involved in research and development. Some customers harvest skin tissue from their pets before they die and order clones after death. Orders are pouring in from both Japan and overseas because it allows you to “reunite” your beloved pet even after it dies. Synogene’s competitors are said to be only in the United States and South Korea.
The central area is located on the third floor, the top floor of the building. On this top floor, there is an area for research and development and for creating clones. When you go up to this third floor, you will find a room containing dog and cat somatic cells frozen with liquid nitrogen. Here, there are special containers containing the somatic cells of over 4,000 animals. Somatic cells are removed from a 2 to 3 mm square area of skin tissue from a pet dog or cat, and the nucleus is extracted. The extracted nucleus is then implanted into another female’s egg, from which the nucleus has previously been removed. The system is such that the egg is implanted in a female and placed in the womb of a dog or cat that will serve as a surrogate mother, resulting in pregnancy and childbirth. Cloning technology has been made possible by progress in the development of peripheral technologies and supporting tools. In a sense, it can be said that technology is being developed that allows us to enter the realm of life and death that was previously considered forbidden. However, it is said that human cloning will never be realized as it is prohibited in each country.
