PLEISTOCENE PARK

I have read a rather interesting article involving the work of Professor George Church, of Harvard University, and I was rather intrigued.  He suggested to the German magazine Der Spiegel that it would be possible to clone a Neanderthal, and use a surrogate modern human to bring back the long extinct species.  The press immediately cherry picked the interview and came to the immediate conclusion that Professor Church was seeking “an adventurous volunteer” to play surrogate, an assertion that Dr. Church was quick to deny.   I should point out that most of the "news" coverage took Dr. Church's comments completely out of context, and did not represent his actual work, or words.  It's sloppy "yellow journalism", but it's a subject for a different day, and probably a different blog.  This particular situation immediately reminded me (and many others) of Michael Crichton’s book (and popular Spielberg movie) “Jurassic Park”, and more importantly, the moral and ethical questions involved.

First, let’s start with the obvious.  Human cloning is highly controversial, and extraordinarily difficult.  Cloning isn’t terribly difficult.  We’ve been doing it for years.  Have you ever eaten a Haas avocado? or perhaps a product with corn in it?  Many vegetable crops are genetically engineered cloned crops.  That may sound scary, but most of the techniques are rudimentary, and use processes that have been around for thousands of years.  Corn is a genetically engineered crop that has evolved to the point where we can control its susceptibility to pests, fertilizers, and herbicides.  Animals are another story.

Even though we’ve been able to make exact clones of mammals for decades, the human genome has proved to be problematic.  Even with our advances in genetic engineering, creating exact duplicates of humans have been unsuccessful.  It isn’t that we can’t clone tissues for therapeutic purposes, like skin grafts for burn patients, we can, but an entire human...no.  Add DNA from a species that went extinct more than 30,000 years ago, and it’s nearly impossible.  There is a reason why we don’t have a Tyrannosaur terrorizing San Diego.  Complex organisms are incredibly difficult to recreate using existing techniques, but Dr. Church's comments led some to believe the technology is closer to reality than currently possible.

The larger issue is the moral and ethical implications of bringing a species back from extinction after many eons.  What is the purpose of resurrecting the extinct Neanderthal?  Dr. Church states that it would be for genetic diversity, and scientific study.   That it is possible for modern humans to suffer from becoming too homogenous and doom itself to extinction without an infusion of new DNA (I realize the irony of using the term “new” to describe DNA from a species that went extinct over 30,000 years ago).  These arguments don't seem to hold up to scrutiny. 

The argument for genetic diversity assumes that our civilization will continue down a path that will lead to genetic stagnation.  I wonder if that is even possible.  With the vast population that seems to be exploding beyond our capacity to sustain, is it possible to continue at that rate?  Simple math says that it isn’t.  Plagues, famine, wars, disasters, and economic and political factors are forces that are impossible to predict, yet inevitably limit our ability to over-run the earth.  We are far more likely to be annihilated in global thermonuclear war, massive meteor impact, super volcanic eruption, or irreparable climate change than we are genetic stagnation.

So what other reasons could there be to clone Neanderthal man?  You could study what a living Neanderthal man would be like.  That would be very helpful for the anthropologists who study early hominids, but any data would be fundamentally flawed.  Much of what we are, as humans, depends largely on our environment.  I speak English because I was raised in America, by an English speaking family.  I also speak (poorly) several other languages because I was raised in a family that speaks other languages.  Any Neanderthal clone would enter this world as an infant, and have to be raised by humans.  Since we don’t fully understand the capabilities of the Neanderthal brain we don’t know how smart the clone would be, but he/she would certainly be intelligent enough to adapt to his/her environment and settings.  We couldn’t learn much about Neanderthal culture or behaviors.  They would mirror our own.

Even if we removed all external stimuli and raised the child without interaction, we would taint the results.  Without a mature adult, we would simply have a feral child, and that raises ethical questions.  Since this isn’t technically a modern human, and therefore another species, would we treat the child as an animal, or a human?  We obtained 1-4% of the modern human genome from Neanderthal.  The child would look more human than other primates do, so our natural tendency would be to treat it like a human.  That would raise legal issues governing everything from education to welfare.  Any child would be the subject of legal battles, special laws, and the inevitable media spotlight.  How can any scientist justify bringing an intelligent sentient life into this world where they will be feared, hated, scorned, ridiculed, mocked, and thought of as a curiosity? 

To paraphrase the quote from “Jurassic Park”: “Neanderthals had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.”  Bringing them back serves no other purpose than to satisfy the scientific ego of geneticists who are more concerned with the fact that they can clone a complex life-form, rather than if they should.  You can’t gain useful insight into Neanderthal society, culture, or behavior from a clone.  Dr. Church’s assertion that it will salvage the human genome from genetic monoculture, and introduce genetic diversity is a shallow argument.  Bringing extinct species back is laudable, but there comes a point where it crosses the boundary between meritorious effort, and scientific arrogance.  Resurrecting Neanderthal to “rescue” the human genome from the natural process of evolution ignores the very process that eliminated that species to begin with.