The cloned rhesus monkey has survived for more than two years and has led to “valuable insights” into the scientific process, experts said.
Scientists in China have used a modified version of the same technology that was used to create Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal.
Of the 113 cloned embryos, 11 were implanted in surrogate monkeys, but only one survived. It has been named ReTro.
The team said that although the success rate in producing healthy, viable clones is low – less than 1% in this case – it advances the understanding of primate cloning.
The world's first cloned monkeys – a pair of long-tailed macaques – were created six years ago by the same researchers, led by Qiang Sun and Chen Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai.
At the time, researchers wanted to create groups of genetically homogeneous monkeys that could be allocated to research into human diseases.
It also raises major ethical questions by bringing the world closer to human cloning.
But experts now say these fears are “completely unfounded” and that the efficiency of the cloning process remains low.
Read more:
The scientist who cloned Dolly the sheep was not a wild-eyed Frankenstein
'He was a giant': Sheep cloning scientist Dolly dies
“These findings provide valuable insights into the mechanism of monkey SCNT reprogramming,” the researchers said in the journal Nature Communications. [single-cell nuclear transfer] “Providing a promising strategy for primate cloning.”
Also commenting on the results, Dr. Luis Montoliu, a researcher at the National Center for Biotechnology in Spain, who was not involved in the study, said: “The cloning of macaques and rhesus monkeys shows two things.
“First, it is possible to clone primates.
“Secondly, and equally important, these experiments are extremely difficult to succeed with such low efficiency, which again rules out human cloning.”
Dolly the sheep appears before the media at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh in 2002
Dolly made history nearly three decades ago after being cloned at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh.
This was the first time scientists had been able to clone a mammal from an adult cell taken from the udder of a Finn Dorset sheep.
Since then, many other mammals have been cloned using the same SCNT technology, which involves transferring the DNA of a cell's nucleus into a donated egg cell which is then induced to develop into an embryo.
They include sheep, cows, pigs, dogs, cats, mice, rats and long-tailed monkeys.
