Hong Kong (CNN) — On the high-altitude plains of Tibet, ringed by snowy mountains and buffeted by harsh winds, scientists are hard at work creating horned, fluffy clones.
These are Tibetan yaks, designed and cloned in secretive labs more than 4,000 meters above sea level, where researchers hope to create an “elite” herd of super-yaks, healthier and more fertile than their predecessors.
This project, scientists hope, could even potentially revive a wild species revered by local Tibetans as a favorite of the land god.
The long-haired Himalayan cattle are a critical part of the region’s economy and culture. But both domestic yaks and their wild cousins have been facing threats for years, with some rare subspecies at risk of disappearing entirely.
Authorities in the southwestern Chinese region have poured tens of millions of dollars into boosting the yak industry in recent years – and they hope cloning can help.
The first yak clone came in July 2025, Chinese state media hailing it as a breakthrough achievement that combined cloning with gene selection. More clones were born this spring – and researchers are now aiming to create a herd of more than 100 “elite” yak clones by 2028, boasting desired traits like faster growth and larger size.
“This shows the technology has moved from a one-time success to a stable, mass-scale application,” said Fang Shengguo, the project’s scientific lead and director of the State Conservation Center for Gene Resources of Endangered Wildlife, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.
But the project, which is supported by the Tibetan government, has also raised concerns among international observers. Cloning remains highly controversial, especially recent “de-extinction” projects, which gained global attention for trying to bring back long-dead species.
Many experts acknowledge there are legitimate arguments for using cloning in conservation, and for gene selection in farming. But the ethical waters are murky, and any such project should have high levels of public transparency and accountability, said Lisa Moses, a veterinarian and bioethicist at Harvard Medical School.
So far, much of the yak cloning project remains mysterious, with information largely limited to glowing state-media coverage.
CNN reached out multiple times to Fang and others on the research team; Fang’s employer Zhejiang University; China’s State Council Information Office; and the Tibet Autonomous Region Information Office. All of them either referred requests to other authorities or never responded.
Yak to the future
First off, there are two main types of yaks in Tibet – and the cloning project has different goals for them.
There are wild yaks, which face the risk of extinction and are protected under Chinese law. Their numbers have declined by more than a third in the last 30 years, with just 10,000 to 20,000 individuals left, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Then we have their smaller cousin, the domestic yak, which is not endangered and numbers roughly 14 million worldwide, the vast majority in the rarefied air of the Tibetan plateaus. They’re a backbone of Tibet’s economy, used by nomadic farmers for wool, milk, meat, and farming labor such as plowing fields.
Both species are threatened by climate change and habitat degradation, with warmer temperatures bringing invasive plant species and increased competition for resources – a big problem in one of the world’s most inhospitable terrains.
“In the plateaus, it is just a fragile ecosystem, and with climate change, you have more extreme weather. It could wipe out entire herds in a particular area if you have a really bad winter storm,” said Carol Chyau, founder of SHOKAY, a yak’s-wool clothing brand that works directly with conservation organizations and Tibetan communities.
There’s also the problem of inbreeding and cross-breeding. Wild yaks cross-breed with domestic yaks, which shrinks their wild genetic pool; and domestic yaks cross-breed with cows, similarly affecting their own genetic pool. Even within the same species, unchecked inbreeding has harmed genetic diversity and overall health, experts say.
Over the past decade, yaks’ body size and weight have gone down, as well as their fertility – with just a 20% success rate in natural reproduction and fertilization, said Fang, the lead scientist, in a news release by Zhejiang University last year. “Human activity and ecological changes have led to a severe degradation crisis for the yak population.”
Cloning, he hopes, can offer a solution.
How to clone your yak
Here’s how you make a clone: First, scientists select the strongest, healthiest yaks as DNA donors. They take their somatic cells (any non-reproductive cell in the body) and extract the nucleus – the tiny core that contains the yak’s genetic information. They then transfer that into an egg cell, which has had its own nucleus removed.
That fertilized egg becomes a clone embryo, which is eventually implanted into a surrogate mother to carry to term.
The first successful clone came from domestic yak DNA – a small, fluffy black calf born via C-section. Videos from Xinhua show the knobby-kneed newborn resting on straw, being stroked and examined by scientists in white coats.
The following 10 clones, also domestic yaks, were “all natural births,” which may allow smoother rollout on a larger scale, the university said. As of June, all the clone calves are “growing healthily,” according to media reports.
Chinese researchers say this approach could bring major economic benefits to the domestic yak industry. For one, it’s much faster than natural reproduction, said a separate news release by Zhejiang University in March. Yaks breed notoriously slowly, with females birthing just four or five offspring in their lifetime – a major challenge for their long-term survival.
And while yaks are already uniquely adapted to their tough environment – with thick fleeces for the extreme cold and huge lungs suited to thin air – scientists can choose yak donors with “the best genetic traits” to breed clones with higher fertility, better disease resistance, and stronger resilience, said the university. This can then improve the quality of their genetic pool and boost farmers’ livelihoods, it said.
Economic advantages aside, they’re also hoping to apply this technology to the conservation of wild yaks – specifically the golden wild yak, a subspecies with only about 300 individuals left in Tibet, according to Chinese state media. It’s so rare and revered it has taken on a semi-mythical air, sometimes described online as a “divine beast.”
Researchers began this effort in 2025, taking cell samples from deceased golden wild yaks and transplanting clone embryos into surrogate mothers. And in April, state broadcaster CCTV reported that researchers had created more than 200 clone embryos of wild yaks (including the golden wild yak) and their crossbred offspring.
But information about this part of the project is almost as scarce as the animals themselves. Researchers have yet to announce any successful birth of a wild yak clone, and it’s not clear what happened to the already-transplanted embryos or the surrogate mothers.
The horns of an ethical dilemma
This project might strike you as dystopian and disturbing, or exciting and encouraging – and its ethical soundness comes down to a few key factors, several experts told CNN.
One ethical framework, which Harvard bioethicist Moses laid out in a 2021 paper, assesses such projects by asking: Are the goals feasible, and would they help protect the environment? Is this process effective, likely to succeed, with accountability mechanisms built in? How are the animals affected?
“I think that the intent does matter,” said Moses. For instance, she added, most members of the public are more comfortable with using cloning for wildlife conservation than for agriculture.
There are other recent examples. In 2020, San Diego Zoo announced it had successfully cloned the endangered Przewalski’s horse, known as the last wild horse. Months later, US officials unveiled Elizabeth Ann, a clone of the highly endangered black-footed ferret. Other “de-extinction” projects aim to resurrect animals like the woolly mammoth and the dire wolf.
These efforts, too, are controversial. Since the beginning, critics of cloning and genetic editing have warned of the dangers of meddling with nature and “playing God,” and the slippery slope of potentially using those technologies on humans.
Even beyond those arguments, some scientists say these projects reduce our sense of urgency toward fixing the environment, and that we can’t simply churn out clones while the planet burns. To truly enact change, they say, we have to continue addressing the root cause of the problem – restoring degraded habitats, lowering carbon emissions, cracking down on poaching, and more.
But for others, “there is a strong feeling … that traditional conservation is essentially failing now,” Moses said. “What we’ve been doing for the last 100 years to try to stave off 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 will actually make a difference, we need to use these technologies, specifically synthetic biology, to essentially override evolution and change the fitness of the species for the environment that they live in.”
There are some who fully embrace the technology, like Julian Savulescu, head of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore. If cloning and gene selection can create animals that “live healthier lives, live longer, benefit humans more – then not only is that permissible, but we have a moral obligation to do it,” he said.
But he, too, acknowledged the complexities at play. For instance, cloning is an imperfect science and can often create offspring with genetic abnormalities. Are the yak scientists “creating unreasonable suffering in a large number of animals to produce a small number of elite animals?” he asked.
It’s impossible to answer this question with the limited information from Chinese and Tibetan authorities and state media. For example, we don’t know how many failed births, miscarriages or deaths took place before the 11 successful clones were born; their exact definition of a “natural birth”; what measures are in place to ensure genetic diversity among the clone herd; and what ethical regulations and oversight are being implemented.
We also need more information about the project’s long-term goals, said Chyau, the SHOKAY founder. If these clone yaks are meant to boost the farming industry, are they being selectively bred to produce more milk, or better cuts of meat, or specific types of wool? How might these specific traits impact the overall yak population and their habitat?
“History is littered with good intentions in the environment gone wrong,” Moses said, “and I would argue that these technologies have even more unknowns than ones that we previously employed.”
The-CNN-Wire
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