Should we clone Neanderthals?

Zach Zorich of Archeology explores the scientific, legal, and ethical obstacles to cloning Neanderthals:

The ultimate goal of studying human evolution is to better understand the human race. The opportunity to meet a Neanderthal and see firsthand our common but separate humanity seems, on the surface, too good to pass up. But what if the thing we learned from cloning a Neanderthal is that our curiosity is greater than our compassion? Would there be enough scientific benefit to make it worth the risks? "I'd rather not be on record saying there would," Holliday told me, laughing at the question. "I mean, come on, of course I'd like to see a cloned Neanderthal, but my desire to see a cloned Neanderthal and the little bit of information we would get out of it...I don't think it would be worth the obvious problems." Hublin takes a harder line. "We are not Frankenstein doctors who use human genes to create creatures just to see how they work." Noonan agrees, "If your experiment succeeds and you generate a Neanderthal who talks, you have violated every ethical rule we have," he says, "and if your experiment fails...well. It's a lose-lose." Other scientists think there may be circumstances that could justify Neanderthal cloning.

"If we could really do it and we know we are doing it right, I'm actually for it," says Lahn. "Not to understate the problem of that person living in an environment where they might not fit in. So, if we could also create their habitat and create a bunch of them, that would be a different story."

"We could learn a lot more from a living adult Neanderthal than we could from cell cultures," says Church. Special arrangements would have to be made to create a place for a cloned Neanderthal to live and pursue the life he or she would want, he says. The clone would also have to have a peer group, which would mean creating several clones, if not a whole colony. According to Church, studying those Neanderthals, with their consent, would have the potential to cure diseases and save lives. The Neanderthals' differently shaped brains might give them a different way of thinking that would be useful in problem-solving. They would also expand humanity's genetic diversity, helping protect our genus from future extinction. "Just saying 'no' is not necessarily the safest or most moral path," he says. "It is a very risky decision to do nothing."

Hawks believes the barriers to Neanderthal cloning will come down. "We are going to bring back the mammoth...the impetus against doing Neanderthal because it is too weird is going to go away." He doesn't think creating a Neanderthal clone is ethical science, but points out that there are always people who are willing to overlook the ethics. "In the end," Hawks says, "we are going to have a cloned Neanderthal, I'm just sure of it."

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Preserve your pets, clone them later

From the ViaGen Website:

ViaGen will gladly gene bank your pet using our CryoSure™ service, for a cost of $1500. Once you place an order, we will ship a refrigerated biopsy kit to your veterinarian, and your veterinarian will return the kit to us with small biopsy samples taken from your pet.

We recommend that you gene bank your pet while it's living, but under certain circumstances you can also gene bank a deceased pet.

ViaGen has no plans to provide commercial cat or dog cloning services. However, we're equipped to provide the highest-quality gene banking services for pets. Once you have preserved your pet's genes, they will remain available for many years. If another company offers cat or dog cloning services in the future, we can transfer your pet's genes to that company for cloning.

If Your Pet Has Died

It's possible to gene bank a pet post-mortem. If you wish to do so, here are some important things you should know:

You have only five days post-mortem to gene bank your pet. ViaGen is not open on weekends or holidays, and you may encounter delays scheduling a biopsy procedure with your veterinarian. Therefore, diligence will be required on your part to meet the five-day deadline.

If your pet has been deceased for one or two days and you live in the USA, take the following actions: refrigerate but don't freeze your pet. Call your veterinarian and schedule an immediate biopsy procedure. Call us toll-free at 888-8VIAGEN to place an order.

If your pet has been deceased for three or four days and you live in the USA, there probably won't be time for us to ship a biopsy kit to your veterinarian, have a biopsy procedure performed, and deliver your pet's biopsy samples to us within five days of death. Please call us toll-free at 888-8VIAGEN so we may discuss your options with you.

We do not accept gene banking orders from outside the USA at this time.

Enter the cybrids

Technology Review talks to biologist Ian Wilmut about his cloning plans for the future:

Research mixing human and animal eggs and sperm has garnered considerable ethical concern and been banned in several countries. The banning was started in part by fears that scientists will create animals with human genes or other ethically questionable organisms, and in part by concerns that mixing animal and human materials diminishes the sanctity of human life. But researchers say that public outcry has largely failed to distinguish between important medical research, such as therapeutic cloning, and more dubious experiments. For example, in the United Kingdom, proposals to use animal eggs for human cloning sparked outcry from an overzealous media portending half-human creatures.

Last month, after a lengthy debate, the U.K. authority overseeing such research overrode a previous ban, approving specific projects to generate these cells. Much like other embryonic stem-cell research, the embryos the scientists generate--dubbed cybrids rather than hybrids because only the cell cytoplasm from the animal is used--are not allowed to develop beyond 14 days.

Ian Wilmut, the biologist who spearheaded the cloning of the now renowned Dolly the sheep, plans to submit his own proposal for cybrid research in the next few months. Wilmut, now director of the Scottish Center for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, ultimately wants to use stem cells cloned from a patient with ALS, a degenerative movement disorder, to develop a model for studying the disease.

Read the entire interview here.