The world’s largest cloning factory is now under construction in China to primarily create cloned cattle embryos for food. But scientists at the factory say that it would have the technology advanced enough to clone humans.

Plans to build the cloning factory were revealed earlier in November by the Chinese company Boyalife Group. Boyalife’s Chief Executive Xu Xiaochun told AFP that they could soon genetically engineer children.

"Unfortunately, currently, the only way to have a child is to have it be half its mum, half its dad,” Xu said. “Maybe in the future you have three choices instead of one. You either have fifty-fifty, or you have a choice of having the genetics 100 percent from daddy or 100 percent from mummy. This is only a choice."

Boyalife said that the 14,000-square-metre facility will produce 100,000 cattle embryos each year, but will eventually increase to one million a year by 2020. The company has invested about 200 million yuan (approx. AU$42,678,000) in the facility, which will include a gene storage area and a museum.

Construction of the main building has already started in Tianjin, northeastern China. The facility will start operation by mid–2016.

Xu noted that cloning cattle is just the start of their plans for the centre. The factory will also clone racehorses and pet dogs, but the company is aiming to also focus on human cloning.

"The technology is already there," he said. "If this is allowed, I don't think there are other companies better than Boyalife that make better technology."

Boyalife is already working with South Korea's cloning institute Sooam Biotech Research Foundation and the Chinese Academy of Sciences for the improvement of their primate cloning capacity. The collaboration aims to create better test animals for various studies about diseases.

The improvement in primate cloning could be the biological step to human cloning. However, Boyalife is expecting the project would potentially raise moral and ethical controversies.

Thus, it is exercising self-restraint to avoid potential public backlash. However, Xu believes that attitudes may soon change, allowing them to perform human experiments in the future.

Boyalife’s partner, Sooam, was reportedly working on a project to bring the species of woolly mammoth back that has already faced extinction. Sooam aims to clone mammoth cells preserved for thousands of years in the Siberian permafrost. Currently, it is offering the market a service of recreating dead pet dogs.

Xu said that the cloning factory will only focus on cattle cloning at the moment to prove their future projects could be plausible. "We want the public to see that cloning is really not that crazy, that scientists aren't weird, dressed in lab coats, hiding behind a sealed door doing weird experiments."

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