No AI yet, but cockroach factory has big plans
CHINA: It is like a scene from a horror movie. A door opens to a dark room, and in the beam of a torchlight, you see them. Hundreds of cockroaches, moving up the side of cupboards, and across the floor. It’s about to get worse. Breeding manager Ying Xiong steps inside and, with bare hands, pulls a cardboard square from a long row of racks. She drops it into a large bowl on the ground, which seems to explode into a churning maelstrom of glistening brown. Thousands of cockroaches stream out.
‘‘At the beginning I was scared, but I got used to it,’’ she says calmly.
Cockroaches, uniform in size, have made it to the doorway and are dropping down from the door frame on to the corridor floor.
‘‘It is like a family pet in our home,’’ she continues. ‘‘It is cute, it never bites. It is not as horrible as people imagine.’’
We are talking about Periplaneta Americana, or the Amer- ican cockroach, and we are standing inside the world’s largest cockroach factory, in the Sichuan mountain town of Xichang. There are at least 3.6 billion cockroaches hiding in racks in rooms along this corridor.
News of the existence of the cockroach breeding factory caused a sensation on social media last week after a Hong Kong newspaper got hold of a research paper and reported (with slight exaggeration) that the company was using artificial intelligence to manage a cockroach colony larger than the world’s human population.
Fu Neng Geng, the president of Good Doctor, a Chinese medicine and health product company, invited the media inside so we can take a rare look for ourselves. He wants to sort internet myth from reality.
The reality boggling.
This is the only governmentcertified cockroach laboratory in is also mind- the world. The artificial intelligence system the company has developed with Zhejiang University won’t be put into practice until next year, when a new lab is built. Cockroach output is expected to triple, Geng says.
For now, the larvae are reared on milk powder and egg in a breeding room. When mature, they are moved to this dank, dark, multistorey building, where they are fed on grain and plants.
The cockroaches must be kept pristine, because they are for human consumption.
Periplaneta Americana has a 2000-year documented history in Chinese medicine to treat injuries, Geng says. Good Doctor supplies its cockroach potion to thousands of Chinese hospitals and pharmacies. It is used to treat diabetic ulcers and severe skin wounds.
Last year the company made 6.3 billion yuan (NZ$1.4 billion) in total sales. The best seller, worth a billion yuan, was the cockroach ‘‘Recovery New Potion’’, which can be drunk or used on the skin. A skin cream called Rainforest Regeneration is sold in glossy blue and gold packaging with no mention of cockroaches.
A cockroach life cycle here is six to eight months. When it is time, the insects are attracted with heat to one part of the room, blasted with steam, then superheated to kill them. They are then washed and crushed and sent to the extraction lab.
‘‘It is a good insect,’’ Geng declares. For millions of years the cockroach has been unaffected by the diseases, bacteria and viruses that humans carry, and he believes this is because of the insect’s anti-inflammatory qualities. Personally, he eats 10 a day.
‘‘If we could isolate the active ingredient, we would produce a synthetic chemical instead,’’ he says of the cockroach potion.
But they can’t, so the business of farming billions of cockroaches continues, providing valuable employment opportunities for the Yi ethnic minority in Sichuan
– Fairfax