Cloned cows born in Caoxian County in East China's Shandong Province can be milked, quite literally, to stimulate China's milk consumption market in the near future.

On January 18, China's first cloned cow was born at the Animal Embryo Engineering Center in Caoxian but it survived for only one hour. This is the first successful experiment of its kind to be conducted entirely in China.

The second cow, named Ke Ke, was born the next day, and remains in very good health, experts from the center said yesterday. Ten more cloned cows are expected to be born in the following 10 days.

Chen Dayuan, a researcher from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the chief expert for the embryo project, said cloning technology can be widely used in various fields, and the cow cloning technologies could be beneficial to future milk industrialization.

Chen said cloning technologies for such milk industrialization has been widely used in other countries. In the United States, the number of milk cows has declined from 12 million to 9 million in the past decade, while milk production output has maintained a growing trend, which has benefited from embryo transfer technology.

Statistics show there are only some 4 million milk cows in China, and the average milk production output covers less than a half compared with developed countries.

A milk cow gives birth to only one baby at one time, and half of the newborns are bulls, who bear much less economic value than the milk cows. Due to the low reproduction rate, it is hard to feed China's milk demand by natural ways, while cloning embryo technologies are said to be the best way to solve the problem.

"It is time to set up our own embryo plant," said Ma Shiyuan, technical head of the embryo center. "Cloning embryo production in our country is transferring from technical research to factory production."

However, the two experts say there are still some academic problems to be solved in the field, and suggest the government help establish an embryo production technology system.

(China Daily January 28, 2002)