Submission + - Wanted: an 'adventurous' surrogate for a Neanderthal baby (theverge.com)
x0d writes: "It seems like fodder for a science fiction movie, but George Church is dead serious: he needs a surrogate mother for a Neanderthal baby. Church (oh, the irony), a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, says he's close to cloning a Neanderthal baby — the first in more than 30,000 years. Speaking to Der Spiegel, Church said that once such cloning technology has matured, all he would need is an "adventurous female human" to act as a surrogate.
Reviving an extinct human ancestor may seem like a ludicrous premise, but it's not as farfetched as it may seem. Church says he's already extracted enough fossil DNA to reconstruct the DNA of a Neanderthal child, and he's been very outspoken about the feasibility of bringing one to term. There's even a precedent for this breed of genetic resurrection, as well. In 2009, researchers in Spain successfully cloned an extinct subspecies of ibex, though it died just minutes after birth."
Reviving an extinct human ancestor may seem like a ludicrous premise, but it's not as farfetched as it may seem. Church says he's already extracted enough fossil DNA to reconstruct the DNA of a Neanderthal child, and he's been very outspoken about the feasibility of bringing one to term. There's even a precedent for this breed of genetic resurrection, as well. In 2009, researchers in Spain successfully cloned an extinct subspecies of ibex, though it died just minutes after birth."
