Adventurous Human Woman Sought After for Neanderthal Baby
Why not clone, asks scientist.
George Church's request could read like a classified ad.; Wanted: Adventurous human woman interested in having a Neanderthal child: appreciation for science helpful.
Church is a scientist himself from Harvard Medical School. He believes that he currently has the technology to bring back the Neanderthal race. His only problem now, is that he needs a woman.
"I have already managed to attract enough DNA from fossil bones to reconstruct the DNA of the human species largely extinct," Church said in an interview with the German magazine, Der Spiegel. "Now I need an adventurous female human."
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Scientists believe that the Neanderthals have been extinct for over 33,000 years, but Church doesn't appear to see that as a set back.
"It depends on a lot of things, but I think it can be done. The reason I would consider it a possibility is that a bunch of technologies are developing faster than ever before," Church told the magazine. "In particular, reading and writing DNA is now about a million times faster than seven or eight years ago."
Church's plan however, could be controversial and would require the act of human cloning.
"We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it's very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn't we be able to do so?" he posed.
A number of people responded by suggesting that Church had failed to point out the ethical and moral dilemmas of his scenario.
"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should..." one user wrote on the Mail Online blog.
"Why would anyone do this, what sort of life would that child have? Unnecessary," another user prompted.
Church has defended his quest by stating the Neanderthals were an intelligent race that may be able to help humans with future dilemmas.
"Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us," he said. "When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it's conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial."
