Should We Clone Neanderthals?

 "In addition to giving scientists the ability to answer questions about Neanderthals' relationship to our own species--did we interbreed, are we separate species, who was smarter--the Neanderthal genome may be useful in researching medical treatments. Newly developed techniques could make cloning Neanderthal cells or body parts a reality within a few years. The ability to use the genes of extinct hominins is going to force the field of paleoanthropology into some unfamiliar ethical territory. There are still technical obstacles, but soon it could be possible to use that long-extinct genome to safely create a healthy, living Neanderthal clone. Should it be done?"

"Although most of the Neanderthal genome sequencing is now being done by the San Diego-based company Illumina, the Max Planck Institute initially chose 454 because it had come up with a way to read hundreds of thousands of DNA sequences at a time. Genome-sequencing technology is advancing at a rate comparable to computer processing power. 'Six years ago if you wanted to sequence E. coli [a species of bacteria], which is about 4 million base-pairs in length, it would have taken one or maybe two million dollars, and it would have taken a year and 150 people,' says Jarvie. "Nowadays, one person can do it in two days and it would cost a few hundred dollars."

It's really much more complicated than that.

"Human rights laws vary widely around the world. 'There is not a universal ban on cloning,' says Anderson. 'Even in the United States there are some states that ban it, others that don't.' On August 8, 2005, the United Nations voted to ban human cloning. It sent a clear message that most governments believe that human cloning is unethical. The ban, however, is non-binding."

Wow, this is getting a little scary.

"As different as Neanderthals were, they may not have been different enough to be considered a separate species. 'There are humans today who are more different from each other in phenotype [physical characteristics],' says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin. He has studied differences in the DNA of modern human populations to understand the rate of evolutionary change in Homo sapiens. Many of the differences between a Neanderthal clone and a modern human would be due to genetic changes our species has undergone since Neanderthals became extinct. 'In the last 30,000 years we count about 2,500 to 3,000 events that resulted in positive functional changes [in the human genome],' says Hawks. Modern humans, he says, are as different from Homo sapiens who lived in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago, as Neolithic people would have been from Neanderthals."

"The Neanderthals' brains made them capable of some impressive cultural innovations. They were burying their dead as early as 110,000 years ago, which means that they had a social system that required formal disposal of the deceased. Around 40,000 years ago, they adopted new stone-tool-making traditions, the Châttelperronian tradition in Western Europe and the Uluzzian in Italy, that included a greater variety of tools than they had used in hundreds of thousands of years."

"Bernard Rollin, a bioethicist and professor of philosophy at Colorado State University, doesn't believe that creating a Neanderthal clone would be an ethical problem in and of itself. The problem lies in how that individual would be treated by others. 'I don't think it is fair to put people...into a circumstance where they are going to be mocked and possibly feared,' he says, 'and this is equally important, it's not going to have a peer group. Given that humans are at some level social beings, it would be grossly unfair.' The sentiment was echoed by Stringer, 'You would be bringing this Neanderthal back into a world it did not belong to....It doesn't have its home environment anymore.'"

"There were no cities when the Neanderthals went extinct, and at their population's peak there may have only been 10,000 of them spread across Europe. A cloned Neanderthal might be missing the genetic adaptations we have evolved to cope with the world's greater population density, whatever those adaptations might be. But, not everyone agrees that Neanderthals were so different from modern humans that they would automatically be shunned as outcasts."

 "I'm convinced that if one were to raise a Neanderthal in a modern human family he would function just like everybody else," says Trenton Holliday, a paleoanthropologist at Tulane University. "I have no reason to doubt he could speak and do all the things that modern humans do."

 "'I think there would be no question that if you cloned a Neanderthal, that individual would be recognized as having human rights under the Constitution and international treaties,' says Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. The law does not define what a human being is, but legal scholars are debating questions of human rights in cases involving genetic engineering. 'This is a species-altering event,' says Andrews, 'it changes the way we are creating a new generation.' How much does a human genome need to be changed before the individual created from it is no longer considered human?"

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