China became the first country to clone a monkey using non-reproductive cells, reducing the need to breed lab monkeys and paving the way for more accurate, effective, and affordable animal tests for new drugs, scientists said on Thursday.

By December, the Institute of Neuroscience of the Chinese Academy of Sciences had created two clone macaques named "Zhong Zhong" and "Hua Hua" by nuclear transferring of somatic cells -- any cell in the organism other than reproductive cells. This was the similar technology used to create the famous clone sheep Dolly in 1996.