Thawing out the Neanderthals
Baku, March 2 (AZERTAC). If Harvard geneticist George Church gets his way, we may be seeing Neanderthals in the not-so-distant future—without having to first drink a quart of Old Overcoat.
The kerfuffle arose when Der Spiegel interviewed Church about his recent book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. People got the impression that Church favors using ancient DNA to create a Neanderthal and is looking for a woman crazy enough to be the surrogate mother. He’s trying to back off, but there’s no reason to believe him. He does favor this experiment, although he doesn’t have want ads out for the crazy lady. Yet. Here is the relevant passage in his book.
So he’s likely correct in thinking that this will soon (ten years?) be possible—except that you certainly wouldn’t want to use a chimpanzee surrogate. Neanderthals had big heads, larger than those of people today, and I doubt if a lady chimp could manage. Church is a world-class expert in lab genetics, but he clearly doesn’t know much about birthin’ babies.
A number of people have said that recreating Neanderthals would be fraught with ethical problems. Of course that does not matter one way or the other. It’s impossible to imagine contemporary Americans refraining from anything on ethical grounds. No, the key question is whether there’s any money in it.
Their minds might differ in interesting ways, and that could be profitable. People think of Neanderthals as stupid, mostly because they lost out to us, but we really don’t know whether they were or not. Their brains were certainly bigger than those of modern humans. For all we know, they were smarter. If they turn out to be a lot smarter, there could be trouble. I think we’ve all seen that movie—the good one, with Charlton Heston, not the crappy one with Wahlberg. But even if they end up enslaving humanity in the long run, they might first give some hedge fund a short-term edge.
It seems to me that born-again Neanderthals would have a pretty strong case against the entire human race. Many ethnic groups complain about oppression—some with reason—but they’re still here. We made Neanderthals extinct. That’s as bad as it gets. They’ll want reparations from everybody, or at least from everyone goofy enough to feel guilty about things their great-to-the-thousandth-power-grandfather may have done, which must include most Americans. Clearly, we’ll have to let them build casinos. Neanderthal gaming! I know that “Hard Rock” is a bit obvious, but themes bring in customers.
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