'Adventurous woman' wanted...

Ladies? Any volunteers? Oh my... maybe this is what Ketchum is REALLY after!

Wanted: 'Adventurous woman' to give birth to Neanderthal man - Harvard professor seeks mother for cloned cave baby


By ALLAN HALL
PUBLISHED: 10:36 EST, 20 January 2013 | UPDATED: 12:49 EST, 20 January 2013

A leading geneticist is on the hunt for an 'adventurous woman' to help turn back the hands of time - and give birth to a Neanderthal baby.

George Church, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, believes he can bring back the extinct ancestor of modern man after more than 33,000 years.

Contrary to popular belief, Neanderthals were in fact a highly intelligent race and Prof Church believes they could be recreated through modern medicine.

He told German magazine, Der Spiegel: 'I have already managed to attract enough DNA from fossil bones to reconstruct the DNA of the human species largely extinct. Now I need an adventurous female human.

'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.

'In particular, reading and writing DNA is now about a million times faster than seven or eight years ago.

'Another technology that the de-extinction of a Neanderthal would require is 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?"

Prof Church, 58, is a pioneer in synthetic biology, which aims is to create synthetic DNA and organisms in the laboratory. During the 1980s, he helped initiate the Human Genome Project that created a map of the human genome.

He admits his project may have shades of Frankenstein about it, but he believes recreating Neanderthals would benefit mankind.

Prof Church added: 'Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us.

'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.

'They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity.

'This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing.

'Therefore the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.'

The geneticist also explains how the process could theoretically be carried out. 'The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. 'The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then synthesize these. Finally, you would introduce these chunks into a human stem cell.

'If we do that often enough, then we would generate a stem cell line that would get closer and closer to the corresponding sequence of the Neanderthal. 'We developed the semi-automated procedure required to do that in my lab. 'Finally, we assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone.'

The missing puzzle in his plan is a surrogate mother for the project, who would be a human female. According to experts, Prof Church's plan is technically possible.

Many of his suggestions formed the central plot-line of the 1993 Steven Spielberg film Jurassic Park, in which dinosaur DNA that had been embedded in chunks of amber was extracted to recreate the monsters that once dominated Earth.

Neanderthals are named after the site in the Neander Valley, Germany, where archaeologists first discovered the species in 1856 - three years before Charles Darwin published his On The Origin Of Species.

#####
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2265402/Wanted-Adventurous-woman-birth-Neanderthal-man--Harvard-professor-seeks-mother-cloned-cave-baby.html#ixzz2IYJ9xgjP

And then they come out looking like this:


And it all goes to Hell from there

Didn't the Ruskies try this back in the day?

miller44 wrote:Didn't the Ruskies try this back in the day?

They did indeed. Or more to the point, the exceptionally Russian-sounding Doctor Ilya Ivanovitch Ivanov did. His attempts to breed an army of unstoppable Soviet ape-men were, of course, unsuccessful, and I believe Stalin had him sent to a gulag where he later died.

The difference, however, is that a Neanderthal might actually work. Ivanov was using chimpanzees, which are of course not human at all.

Ravinoff wrote:The difference, however, is that a Neanderthal might actually work. Ivanov was using chimpanzees, which are of course not human at all.

Yeah it might "work" but work in what sense?

What about when the kid turns 16 and wants to go on a date or whatever? I'm not exactly a bleeding-heart-type person, but I think it would be an impossibly cruel thing to bring a different type of humanoid into being and expect them to function in our society. The childhood especially, can you imagine?

miller44 wrote:

Ravinoff wrote:The difference, however, is that a Neanderthal might actually work. Ivanov was using chimpanzees, which are of course not human at all.

Yeah it might "work" but work in what sense?

What about when the kid turns 16 and wants to go on a date or whatever? I'm not exactly a bleeding-heart-type person, but I think it would be an impossibly cruel thing to bring a different type of humanoid into being and expect them to function in our society. The childhood especially, can you imagine?

So true, I sure wouldn't want to be a lab experiment.

Two thing will happen.. Either they make a crap load of them, or the kid becomes a celeb and probably starts doing Geico Commercials... Either way he/she won't have any problems getting a date lol.