"Adventurous Female Human" Needed to Give Birth to Neandertal
By Genome Web,
Genome Web
| 01. 17. 2013
Many Germans are afraid of genetic engineering, according to Spiegel Online, the online offshoot of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, and Harvard's George Church doesn't do much to alleviate those fears.
In an online excerpt of a Q&A published in this week's Der Spiegel, Church talks about recreating Neandertals, engineering humans to live to 120, making people resistant to viruses, and exchanging DNA with other species.
"Like no one else, molecular biologist George Church represents a guild that is prepared to try out anything that can be done, unconditionally," Spiegel Online writes.
According to the site, Church is currently developing technology in his lab that can be used to make human cells similar to those of Neandertals. Eventually, an "adventurous female human" needs to be found as a surrogate mother for the first Neandertal baby, Church is cited as saying, and, from many individuals, "a kind of Neandertal culture" could arise that could gain "political significance."
Church doesn't understand "why many people should be so profoundly upset by these kinds of technologies," since the concept of...
Related Articles
By Shelly Fan, Singularity Hub | 05.31.2024
We all know the drill for reproduction—sperm meets egg.
For the past decade, scientists have been pushing the boundaries of where the two halves come from. Thanks to induced pluripotent stem cell technology, it’s now possible to scrape skin cells...
By Alison Snyder, Axios | 06.06.2024
Gene editing's next chapter will be focused on tackling cancers and more common diseases, uncovering new details about aging and other fundamental aspects of biology and editing RNA, top scientists in the field said this week.
The big picture: ...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 04.24.2024
Lisa Pisano was lying in a hospital bed at NYU Langone Health, hooked up to beeping monitors and an array of tubes. Her surgical wounds were still healing, and she looked tired. But the 54-year-old New Jersey woman said she...
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 05.06.2024
It was a cool morning at the beef teaching unit in Gainesville, Florida, and cow number #307 was bucking in her metal cradle as the arm of a student perched on a stool disappeared into her cervix. The arm held...