Sir John Gurdon, the British scientist whose work cloning frogs in the 1950s and 60s led to the creation of Dolly the sheep by Edinburgh scientists in 1996, said human cloning could happen within half a century.

The biologist who won this year’s Nobel prize thinks that while any attempt to clone a human would raise complex ethical issues, people would soon overcome their concerns if the technique became medically useful.

He explained that in-vitro fertilisation was regarded with considerable suspicion when it was first developed but became widely accepted after the birth of Louise Brown, the first ‘test tube baby’, in 1978.

Speaking on BBC Radio Four’s The Life Scientific, the biologist said he had predicted at the time of his frog experiments that the successful cloning of a mammal would happen within 50 years, and that and that the same answer could be applied to human cloning today

I said: “Well, it could be anywhere between 10 years and 100 years – how about 50 years?” It turned out that wasn’t far off the mark as far as Dolly was concerned. Maybe the same answer is appropriate.’

I wouldn’t doubt that the science behind this is already very advanced, could this be the impetus behind the fact that governments all over the world are creating DNA Databases. Along with attempts to gather the DNA of world leaders. could there be a concerted Genetic engineering project in the works?