This is unexpected and also establishes that just about any creature
that has gone extinct during the last twenty thousand years is
prospective at least. I consider the creatures wiped out over the
past five centuries and preserved in museum collections as inevitable
recovery prospects. Most will require habitat reconstruction first
but even that is just beginning to get underway. Most are islands
anyway so it is possible at least.
I suspect that the passenger pigeon will have difficulties with
rodents though.
At least the prospect is been raised and it would allow a lot of
questions to be answered.
Neanderthal to be
born to surrogate mother?
Posted on Saturday, 19 January, 2013
There have been
indications that a cloning experiment to create a live Neanderthal
may be on the cards.
While the idea of using DNA from frozen mammoth remains to clone a live specimen is nothing new, the concept that we could do something similar to bring back extinct species of human such as Neanderthals may prove quite a shock to most people. Despite the technical and ethical difficulties inherent in such an endeavor, there are signs that some scientists may be considering research leading up to such an achievement and that they may need a surrogate human mother to deliver the child.
Recently Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church was quoted as saying that eventually, an "adventurous female human" would be required to act as a surrogate mother in the birth of the first Neanderthal in 30,000 years. It's a topic that Church has talked about before, in 2009 he hinted at the possibility of cloning a "near-Neanderthal" when the Neanderthal genome was first reported.
While the idea of using DNA from frozen mammoth remains to clone a live specimen is nothing new, the concept that we could do something similar to bring back extinct species of human such as Neanderthals may prove quite a shock to most people. Despite the technical and ethical difficulties inherent in such an endeavor, there are signs that some scientists may be considering research leading up to such an achievement and that they may need a surrogate human mother to deliver the child.
Recently Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church was quoted as saying that eventually, an "adventurous female human" would be required to act as a surrogate mother in the birth of the first Neanderthal in 30,000 years. It's a topic that Church has talked about before, in 2009 he hinted at the possibility of cloning a "near-Neanderthal" when the Neanderthal genome was first reported.
While the idea of
reviving Neanderthals may sound farfetched, take for example the work
of biologists to clone endangered or extinct non-human animals.
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