WEDNESDAY, Jan. 24, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- The world's first genetically identical monkey clones have been created by Chinese scientists, who say they've broken barriers to human cloning.

But both the scientists and other experts say it's highly unlikely this advance will result in human clones in the foreseeable future.

The researchers, instead, are touting the potential for improving primate studies into human health problems such as heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's.

The two long-tailed macaques -- dubbed Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua -- were born eight and six weeks ago. Scientists used the same laboratory cloning process that created Dolly the sheep in Scotland in 1996, the researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai announced.

Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua are essentially identical twins, with identical DNA in all of their chromosomes, said researcher Mu-ming Poo, the institute's director.

"Humans are primates," Poo said. With the cloning of a primate species, "the technical barrier is now broken. In principle, that can be applied to humans."

Despite this breakthrough don't expect human cloning anytime in the near future, said bioethicist Henry Greely, a professor of law and genetics at Stanford University.

The process used by the Chinese scientists relied on fetal cells rather than adult cells and is not very efficient, requiring many failed attempts just to create these two successful clones, Greely said.

"There are many things that worry me, that occasionally make me lose sleep," Greely said. "Human cloning isn't one of them."

Primate species have been notoriously resistant to attempts at cloning, Greely said. Some species just are like that; for example, mice and cats are easy to clone, but rats and dogs are difficult.

The Chinese researchers created the two monkey clones using a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which DNA drawn from a cell is inserted into an egg. The egg is then implanted into a female for gestation.

Eggs created with the same DNA will result in genetically identical offspring, even if they are implanted into different females.