Human cloning might be possible within the next 50 years, a British scientist has predicted.

Sir John Gurdon, a recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Medicine, spoke on BBC Radio 4's The Life Scientific on Tuesday about the future possibilities of cloning humans.

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Gurdon emphasized on the show that successfully cloning a human being means creating an identical twin, or "copying what nature has already produced," the Telegraph reported.

He gave an example of parents with deceased children — if the parents are no longer fertile, he said, they might be able to create another child using the mother's eggs and the former child's skin cells.

There's still a lot of research that needs to be done before it could safely be applied to humans, he said, since the majority of animals tested have turned out deformed. But, he added, the progress that's been made since his original work cloning frogs in the 1970s is an optimistic step in the right direction.

Watch the video above to learn more, and listen to the full radio interview here.

Photo by AFP/Stringer/Getty Images

