Sir John Gurdon, the British scientist who won this year’s Nobel prize for medicine, says that the progression to human cloning could happen within the next 50 years. It is also Gurdon’s work involving the cloning frogs in the 1950’s and 60’s that led to the later creation of Dolly the sheep by Edinburgh scientists in 1996.

Speaking on BBC Radio Four’s The Life Scientific, Sir John also said that parents who lose children in accidents may be able to clone “copies” to replace them.

Even though this is something that is bound to raise a host of complex ethical issues, the biologist claims people would soon overcome their concerns if the technique became medically useful.

I take the view that anything you can do to relieve suffering or improve human health will usually be widely accepted by the public – that is to say if cloning actually turned out to be solving some problems and was useful to people, I think it would be accepted. In-vitro fertilisation, for instance, was regarded with extreme suspicion when it was first developed. But it has since became widely accepted after the birth of Louise Brown, the first “test tube baby”, in 1978.

Sir John also added that cloning a human being effectively means making an identical twin, and doctors would therefore simply be “copying what nature has already produced”.

[Source: Telegraph]