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"If the mammoth can be resurrected, the same would be technically possible for Neanderthals."

With some old hair and $10 million, scientists have a way to construct a real live mammoth, and they can't help thinking about making a Neanderthal man:

But the process of genetically engineering a human genome into the Neanderthal version would probably raise many objections, as would several other aspects of such a project. ?Catholic teaching opposes all human cloning, and all production of human beings in the laboratory, so I do not see how any of this could be ethically acceptable in humans,? said Richard Doerflinger, an official with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

[George Church, a well known genome technologist at the Harvard Medical School] said there might be an alternative approach that would ?alarm a minimal number of people.? The workaround would be to modify not a human genome but that of the chimpanzee, which is some 98 percent similar to that of people. The chimp?s genome would be progressively modified until close enough to that of Neanderthals, and the embryo brought to term in a chimpanzee.

Got a problem with that?

Full post as published by Althouse on November 19, 2008 (boomark / email).