Hong Kong —
In the high-altitude plains of Tibet, surrounded by snowy mountains and exposed to harsh winds, scientists are hard at work creating fluffy clones with horns.
These are Tibetan yaks designed and cloned in a top-secret laboratory more than 4,000 meters above sea level, where researchers hope to create an “elite” herd of super yaks that will be healthier and more fertile than their predecessors.
Scientists hope the project may even bring back a wild species that local Tibetans revere as favorites of the land gods.
Long-haired Himalayan cattle are an integral part of the region’s economy and culture. But domestic yaks and their wild cousins have been under threat for years, with some rare subspecies at risk of disappearing entirely.
Authorities in southwestern China have poured tens of millions of dollars into revitalizing the yak industry in recent years, hoping cloning will help.
The first yak clone was born in July 2025, and Chinese state media hailed it as a breakthrough in combining cloning and genetic selection. More clones will be born this spring, and researchers are now aiming to create a herd of more than 100 “elite” yak clones by 2028, boasting desirable traits such as faster growth and larger size.
“This marks the transition of this technology from a one-time success to stable large-scale application,” said Fang Shengguo, the project’s scientific director and director of the National Endangered Wildlife Genetic Resources Conservation Center, according to state-run Xinhua news agency.
But the project, backed by the Tibetan government, has also raised concerns among international observers. Cloning remains controversial, especially the recent “endangered species removal” project, which sought to bring back long-dead species and attracted global attention.
Many experts agree that there are legitimate arguments for the use of cloning in conservation and genetic selection in agriculture. But Lisa Moses, a veterinarian and bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, said the ethical lines are blurred and such projects require a high level of public transparency and accountability.
So far, much of the yak cloning project remains shrouded in mystery, with information largely limited to glowing reports in state media.
CNN has contacted Huang and other members of the research team multiple times. Mr. Fang’s employer, Zhejiang University. Newspaper Office of the State Council of China. and Tibet Autonomous Region Information Bureau. They all referred requests to other authorities or did not respond at all.
First, there are two main types of yaks in Tibet, and each cloning project has a different purpose.
Wild yaks are also endangered and protected under Chinese law. Their numbers have declined by more than a third over the past 30 years, with only 10,000 to 20,000 remaining, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Then there is the yak, a smaller relative of the yak. Yaks are not endangered and there are approximately 14 million yaks worldwide, most of whom live in the rarefied air of the Tibetan Plateau. They are the backbone of the Tibetan economy, used by nomads for wool, milk, meat, and agricultural labor to till the fields.
Both species are threatened by climate change and habitat degradation, with rising temperatures leading to more invasive plant species and increased competition for resources. This is a major problem in one of the world’s most inhospitable landscapes.
“It’s a fragile ecosystem on the plateau, and climate change will make extreme weather events more intense. If the winter storms are really bad, they can wipe out herds in certain areas,” said Carol Shau, founder of SHOKAY, a yak wool clothing brand that works directly with conservation organizations and Tibetan communities.
There are also issues of inbreeding and interbreeding. Wild yaks interbreed with domestic yaks, shrinking the wild genetic pool. Domestic yaks then interbreed with cows, similarly influencing their own gene pool. Unchecked inbreeding, even within the same species, is having a negative impact on genetic diversity and overall health, experts say.
Over the past decade, yaks’ size and weight have declined, as has their reproductive ability. The success rate of natural reproduction and fertilization is only 20%, said lead scientist Fan of Zhejiang University in a news release last year. “Yak populations are at risk of severe degradation due to human activities and ecosystem changes.”
He hopes cloning can provide a solution.
Here’s how to make a clone: First, scientists select the strongest and healthiest yaks as DNA donors. They take out the somatic cells (non-reproductive cells in the body) and extract the nucleus (the small nucleus that contains the yak’s genetic information). It is then transferred to an egg cell that has its own nucleus removed.
The fertilized egg becomes a cloned embryo, which is eventually implanted into a surrogate mother and carried to birth.
The first successful clone was born from the DNA of a domestic yak, a small, fluffy black calf born by Caesarean section. A video released by Xinhua News Agency shows the newborn baby with a humped knee resting on straw, being petted and examined by scientists in white coats.
The university said the next 10 clones were also domestic yaks and were “all naturally born”, potentially facilitating a larger-scale rollout. As of June, all cloned calves were “growing healthy,” according to media reports.
Chinese researchers say this approach could bring significant economic benefits to the country’s yak industry. For one thing, it’s much faster than natural reproduction, said another news release from Zhejiang University in March. Yaks are notoriously slow breeders, with females giving birth to only four to five offspring during their lifetime, which poses a major challenge to their long-term survival.
And while yaks have unique adaptations to their already harsh environment, such as thick wool to withstand frigid temperatures and large lungs suited to thin air, scientists will be able to select yak donors with the “best genetic traits” and breed clones with higher fecundity, better disease resistance and greater resilience, the university said. This could improve the quality of the gene pool and improve farmers’ livelihoods, the report said.
Aside from the economic benefits, they also want to apply the technology to the conservation of wild yaks, especially the golden wild yak, a subspecies of which only about 300 remain in Tibet, according to Chinese state media. They are so rare and revered that they take on a semi-mythical quality, and are sometimes described online as “divine beasts.”
Researchers began the effort in 2025, taking cell samples from dead golden wild yaks and implanting cloned embryos into surrogate mothers. And in April, state broadcaster CCTV reported that researchers had created more than 200 cloned embryos of the offspring of wild yaks (including the golden wild yak) and their hybrids.
But information about this part of the project is as scarce as the animals themselves. Researchers have not yet announced that they have successfully cloned a wild yak, and it is not clear what happened to the implanted embryos or surrogate mothers.
The project may seem dystopian and disturbing, or provocative and uplifting, but its ethical soundness depends on several key factors, experts told CNN.
One ethical framework, laid out in a 2021 paper by Harvard bioethicist Moses, is to evaluate such projects by asking, “Is the goal achievable and will it help protect the environment?” Is this process effective and has built-in accountability mechanisms so it is likely to succeed? How will the animals be affected?
“I think intent is important,” Moses said. For example, most people are more comfortable using cloning for wildlife conservation than for agriculture, she added.
There are other recent examples. In 2020, the San Diego Zoo announced that it had successfully cloned Przewalski’s horse, an endangered species known as the last wild horse. A few months later, U.S. authorities released Elizabeth Ann, a clone of the highly endangered black-footed ferret. Other “eradication” projects aim to revive animals such as woolly mammoths and dire wolves.
These efforts are also controversial. From the beginning, critics of cloning and gene editing have warned of the dangers of interfering with nature and “playing God” and of the slippery slope of potentially using these techniques on humans.
Beyond these arguments, some scientists argue that these projects reduce our sense of urgency for environmental remediation and that we can’t simply mass-produce clones while the Earth burns. To make real change, they say, we must continue to address the root causes of the problem, including restoring degraded habitat, reducing carbon emissions and cracking down on poaching.
But for others, “there’s a strong feeling that traditional conservation is now essentially failing,” Moses said. “What we have been doing for the past 100 years to stop ecological destruction is not working.”
“The argument is we don’t have a choice,” she added. “If we want to try to do something that actually makes a difference, we need to use these technologies, especially synthetic biology, to essentially override evolution and change the suitability of species to the environments they live in.”
Some, like Julian Savulescu, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore, are fully embracing the technology. If cloning and genetic selection “can produce animals that live healthier lives, live longer, and provide more benefits to humans, then not only is that permissible, we have a moral obligation to do so,” he said.
But he also acknowledged that the issue was complex. For example, cloning is an imperfect science and can often result in offspring with genetic abnormalities. Are yak scientists “inflicting undue suffering on many animals in order to create an elite few”? he asked.
With limited information from Chinese and Tibetan authorities and state media, it is impossible to answer this question. For example, we don’t know how many failed births, miscarriages, and deaths occurred before the 11 clones were born. Their exact definition of “natural birth”. What measures are being taken to ensure genetic diversity among clonal populations? and what ethical regulations and oversight are in place.
SHOKAY founder Chyau also said more information is needed about the project’s long-term goals. If these cloned yaks are intended to boost the agricultural industry, are they being selectively bred to produce more milk, better cuts of meat, or specific types of wool? How might these specific traits affect the overall yak population and its habitat?
“History is littered with good intentions in settings that have gone wrong, and I would argue that there is more to these technologies than we have previously employed,” Moses said.
