Some people want to climb the highest mountain, or walk on the surface of Mars, or discover the cure for cancer…
Professor George Church, a brilliant genetics professor at Harvard Medical School wants to resurrect Mankind’s long lost relative, the Neanderthal. He plans to accomplish it by using the harvested DNA acquired from Neanderthal bones and creating a Neanderthal embryo with stem cells. The embryo would grow inside a female volunteer.
Church is confident that a Neanderthal will again soon walk the earth and all he needs now, he says, is “an adventurous female human.” The Harvard professor’s confidence is based on the belief that the stem cells would govern the subsequent development of the implanted embryo into the desired Neanderthal characteristics. Although the surrogate mother would be Homo sapiens, the baby would be a red-blooded, American Neanderthal—the first Neanderthal to breathe the air and eventually walk the earth in some 33,000 years.
Although many people think Neanderthals were dull-witted, lumbering oafs, in reality they were intelligent and may have had a brain as large or larger than modern humans, Church explained.
“Neanderthals might think differently than we do. They could even be more intelligent than us,” he told German magazine Der Spiegel during an interview. “When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet, it’s conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.”
Other scientists are also seeking to bring back a part of Earth’s lost past.
Scientists in Japan and Russia are working on projects to resurrect the Wooly Mammoth.
Several teams have been working for more than a decade to gather the necessary genetic material to resurrect the extinct woolly mammoth. The mammoth is a relative of the modern day elephant. Mammoths are thought to have completely died out about 4,000 years ago. The last ones are thought to have lived on a small island in the Aleutians.
“Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth,” Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, told the Daily Telegraph during an interview with the newspaper about the visionary project.
Back in the United States, world-famous dinosaur expert Dr. Jack Horner, a professor at Montana State University, wants to resurrect a Velociraptor-sized dinosaur. He is convinced it can be done and even hopes to have one as a pet someday.
Horner is adamant he will succeed. And when the day arrives that baby dinosaurs begin hatching from genetically modified eggs, Horner had better have some strong leashes handy.
