「科幻變現實」 中國克隆工廠驚人

choi

BBC Chinese, Jan 14, 2014
www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/trad/scie ... china_cloning.shtml
(BBC科技事務編輯舒克曼採訪; 華大基因科技服務有限公司（簡稱華大科技）)

, which is an ABBREVIATED version of

David Shukman, China Cloning on an 'Industrial Scale.'
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25576718

Quote:

"Run by a fast-growing company called BGI, this facility has become the world's largest centre for the cloning of pigs.

"the [pig clone] team can do two implantations a day. The success rate is about 70-80%

"The scale of ambition is staggering. BGI is not only the world's largest centre for cloning pigs - it's also the world's largest centre for gene sequencing. In neighbouring buildings, there are rows of gene sequencers - machines the size of fridges operating 24 hours a day crunching through the codes for life. To illustrate the scale of this operation, Europe's largest gene sequencing centre is the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge. It has 30 machines. BGI has 156 and has even bought an American company that makes them.


My comment:
(a) " Blue plastic bags cover her [sow's] trotters."

trotter  豬腳
(n): "a pig's foot used as food "
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trotter

(b) "The scientist in charge [of cloning, not CEO], Dr Yutao DU"
(i) Yutao DU, MD, PhD
(ii) 杜玉涛博士：公司首席科学家. 深圳华大方舟生物技术有限公司, undated
www.bab-genomics.com/list.aspx?catid=141
("理学博士，2008年毕业于丹麦奥胡斯大学人类遗传系")

The Web page does not say where she received MD.
(c)
(i) Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellcome_Trust_Sanger_Institute
(The Institute operates two PhD training programmes: a four year course for basic science graduates, and a thee year course for clinicians [MD to get a PhD])

is private (presumably affiliated with .

Sigh! It is easier and takes less tie to obtain a PhD in Europe. In 1990s US National Science Foundation (NSF) had statistics showing average years to obtain a PhD in biological field in US was more than nine (9) years!  I had known a Harvard graduate student who spent more than eleven years to finally get the PhD; to be fair, he came to the lab only a few hours a day (weekdays only), which is woefully insufficient, as an experiment in molecular biology generally last a day; his boss, he said, did not dare to fire him, because he was the only graduate student the boss ever had (the lab was withi Massachusetts General Hospital; the boss was a MD, not PhD--something not highly valuable in research).

(ii) Sanger Institute History. Undated
www.sanger.ac.uk/about/history/history.html
(located at "the small village of Hinxton * * * nine miles south of Cambridge")
(d) "The BGI canteen is used as a testbed for some of the products from the labs: everything from grouper twice the normal size, to pigs, to yoghurt."

A grouper is fish.
(e) I just wonder who pays. Neither cloning nor sequencing is not profitable.