Home Would You Give Birth To A Neandertal Baby?

Would You Give Birth To A Neandertal Baby?

MIT Technology Review spots a wild story on Genome Web about George Church, a molecular geneticist at Harvard, who is developing technology that can create Neandertal cells. Once he gets the cells, Church hopes to find an “adventurous female human” who will volunteer to be a surrogate mom for the first new Neandertal baby. Church says this could bring about “kind of Neandertal culture” that could even achieve “political significance.”

The original (paywalled) article ran in Der Spiegel. Apparently the Germans are appalled by Church’s nonchalance about doing things like mixing DNA from different species. Somewhere, eccentric futurist Ray Kurzweil is freaking out as he realizes that even if he becomes a cyborg, he’ll have to share the planet with cavemen. This is not the future that Kurzweil and his fellow Singularitarians have been hoping for. Not at all! Somewhere in Hollywood someone is already writing the screenplay: Cyborgs Versus Cavemen: The Battle for Planet Earth.

God, I love science.

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