If Paabo and 454 Life Sciences should succeed in reconstructing the entire Neanderthal genome, it might in principle be possible to bring the species back from extinction by inserting the Neanderthal genome into a human egg and having volunteers bear Neanderthal infants. This might be the best possible way of finding out what each Neanderthal gene does, but scientists are quick to point out the great technical and ethical problems in any such venture.
Paabo said that he could not even imagine how such a project could be accomplished and that in any case ethical concerns “would totally preclude such an experiment.”
Lahn described the scenario as “certainly possible but futuristic.”
If functional Neanderthal chromosomes could be created, presumably it would be technically possible to insert them into a human egg whose own chromosomes had been removed, and have a volunteer carry the embryo to term.
But there would be daunting ethical problems in bringing a Neanderthal child into the world again.
“My first consideration would be for a child born alone in the world with no relatives,” said Ronald M. Green, an ethicist at Dartmouth College. The risk would be greater if, following the plot line of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a mate were created as a companion for the lonely Neanderthal. “This was a species we competed with. We would not want to recreate a situation of two competing advanced hominid species,” he said.
But Green said there could be arguments in the future for resurrecting the Neanderthals. “If we learn this is a species that was wrongly pushed off the stage of history, there is something of a moral argument for bringing it back,” he said. “But the status quo is not without merit. Curiosity alone could not justify what could be a disaster for both species.”
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