‘Adventurous’ Woman Needed as Surrogate for Neanderthal Baby

[Starry Messenger]

http://gawker.com/5977130/could-you-be-the-adventurous-woman-scientists-need-to-give-birth-to-the-first-neanderthal-baby-in-30000-years

Are you an adventurous human woman? Adventurous enough to be a surrogate mother for the first Neanderthal baby to be born in 30,000 years?

Harvard geneticist George Church recently told Der Spiegel he's close to developing the necessary technology to clone a Neanderthal, at which point all he'd need is an "adventurous human woman" — einen abenteuerlustigen weiblichen Menschen — to act as a surrogate mother.

It's not out of the question at all. As MIT Technology Review's Susan Young points out, scientists cloned an extinct subspecies of ibex in 2009. It died immediately, sure. But they still cloned it.

What would that entail? According to a 2008 study of a Neanderthal infant skeleton (from which the above image is taken), "the head of the Neanderthal newborn was somewhat longer than that of a human newborn because of its relatively robust face," and Neanderthal women generally had a wider birth canal than human women. Neanderthal birth was simpler than human birth, because Neanderthal infants didn't have to rotate to get to the birth canal, but otherwise the processes were very similar. (Even so, I imagine all but the most adventurous of human women would opt for a C-section in this case.)

42 is probably a bit too old, sadly. My mom has been hinting for grandchildren...

[arcane1]

1. George Church is in need of a sabbatical

I'm a science geek, and nothing stirs my imagination more than prehuman and prehistoric history, but this is madness.

[Starry Messenger]

2. I guess it's possible to get a little too deeply involved in your area of expertise.

He might get volunteers though, people do funny things!

[arcane1]

4. Rule 34

[Marrah_G]

3. Bad idea

[Starry Messenger]

5. Someone on FB pointed out that this sounds like the X-files.

[csziggy]

6. Shades of "The Ugly Little Boy" by Isaac Asimov!

While that was not a cloned child, I wonder what problems a child so genetically different might have?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy

A Canadian adaptation of the story:

[Starry Messenger]

7. Ooo!

I never knew about the adaptation! Thanks cziggy, I'll watch this weekend. I remember that story now!

[siligut]

9. One of my favorite short stories

And first thing I thought of when I read the subline. Thanks for this, bookmarking to watch later.

[DreamGypsy]

13. We are blinded by our preconceptions...

I read a LOT of Asimov in my younger years, but I must have missed this story and the novel with Silverburg. Wow, what an incredible indictment of human stupidity.

First, the young person is not 'ugly' ... he's different (at least we assume that he is not as she...after all, not wearing a dress when it arrives). Second, trying to understand something/one pulled completely out of it's context is ridiculous ... brings to mind all of the erroneous conclusions about wolf behavior - alpha dominance, pack hierarchy, battles for succession, etc. - arrived at by studying wolves in captivity, when those conclusions disappear studying wolves in the wild. Or concluding that giraffes gather into groups 'for protection' in the presence of a predator, just because that's what happens in your local animal safari park when the observation bus pulls up.

Nurse Fellows undoubtedly learned a thousand times more about our Neanderthal ancestors in the first weeks after she arrived in her new home, than looking through human preconceptions could achieve in a thousand 'stasis' experiments.

Cloning a specimen of an ancient, extinct species to develop in human miasma of influences and assumptions will likely tell us nothing of substance that we could not learn from DNA analysis. The beauty of life forms is how they develop and survive in the evolutionary environment that brought them into existence.

[Hekate]

15. It moved me deeply when I read it when growing up

I never knew it was made into a film, though.

Human beings can be so blind -- and science, after all, is done by human beings and not gods. Blind and cruel.

They could probably find some woman to participate in the experiment -- women rent their wombs out for money all the time these days, and that's all it would be. But like stealing the child out of his time in "The Ugly Little Boy" it would be wrong and cruel.

Hekate

[DavidDvorkin]

8. This will have a huge effect on the sport of American football

No, on second thought, it will have no effect on football at all.

[Starry Messenger]

10. Could have far-reaching consequences for golf though.

[Kaleva]

16. And figure skating.

[Heidi]

17. !!!!!!

[CthulhusEvilCousin]

11. Perhaps illegal

Isn't it illegal to clone human beings? Or so I've heard, at least in the United States. Studies of the genome have already shown that humans and Neanderthals mated in the distant past. If they could breed with successful children who weren't infertile or had some other serious issue, by definition Neanderthals are the same species as us, physical characteristics aside. Down in Australia, they have found human skeletons of women as tall as 6 feet, with men around seven feet tall, and yet they are still human.

[Starry Messenger]

12. Hmmm.

I guess they could take the project out to international waters. A year offshore, a good obstetrics lab on a boat.

[Paulie]

14. There is also the small problem with the half life of DNA

It's a little over 500 years. Going to try and make a composite genome?

http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11555