Professor
George Church of Harvard Medical School is a very well-respected geneticist. So, it's a little bewildering to hear of his bizarre plan to resurrect an extinct humanoid species via DNA manipulation. Church wants to
reconstruct Neanderthal DNA, inject it into stem cells, and implant an embryo into a host human mother. We're all for scientific advancement, but this seems more like a bad
George Romero film from the fifties. While Church rightly states that Neanderthals—who became extinct about 30,000 years ago—do not fit the stereotype of mindless caveman, what possible benefit could come from this scheme? Is Church thinking at all about the ethical implications of his experiment? How safe can it be for a being equipped with 30,000-year old DNA to be dropped into the 21st century? With all due respect, this seems like a dumb idea.
