Time travel-impossible. If it were possible, there would be people from the future visiting us in 2013 today, right? It's a pretty cool concept; we would be able to meet people from the past and get insight into what really happened throughout history, as well as know where we're headed in the future. But, it has been fairly evident that time is a dimension that we won't be able to navigate outside of books and movies.

But, in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, Harvard School of Medicine genetics professor George Church suggested that it is potentially scientifically possible to do what may be the closest thing to traveling through time-cloning a Neanderthal. And, yes, that would involve finding a surrogate human mother to carry the Neanderthal baby-if this ever gets the approval.

Of course, this garnered attention from the scientific community as well as the general population around the world. But, the main point Church was trying to get across was misconstrued, according to Reuters. What Church actually wanted to say was that studying Neanderthals would be an excellent way to learn more about how humans work and function, and help to solve the mystery behind some contemporary diseases. Nevertheless, his original article spurred many ethical debates, and it is a great example of where science has the ability to take us, but also where morality needs to come to play.

Neanderthals became extinct around 30,000 years ago, and, while they were similar to the human species, they are actually a different species. They were intelligent, used tools and had a language which they used to communicate. Size-wise, they were slightly larger then modern-day humans, and had a different cranial structure.

As Church said, learning about Neanderthals would give insight into how we function as people, and yes, in this, life-saving treatments and cures could be discovered. Not only that, but it would be incredibly interesting to see how a Neanderthal would fair today. But, ethically speaking, cloning a Neanderthal is not going to happen any time soon.

Even if it were possible, bringing a Neanderthal into the world today would not be fair to it. For one obvious reason, it would be the only living creature of its whole species, and one that hasn't lived in thousands of years. While Church did suggest cloning two Neanderthals so they would have an idea of self, there is still a lack of a group of the species, which could be especially confusing to the Neanderthal as it grows up.

This also hinders the ability to actually study it as it would have behaved over 30,000 years ago when Neanderthals did exist-they were brought up by their own species and not by humans. The conditions of how the Neanderthals used to live cannot be duplicated since we do not know enough about them, and they would have no parents to follow in the footsteps of-everything they do would be either innately learned or copied from what humans do.
Another issue is that 30,000 years ago, the diseases that existed were different from those of today. The cloned Neanderthal would be exposed to so many new strains of viruses and bacterial infections that it would have no way to fight.

Not only do we not know what diseases the Neanderthal would be infected with, we also don't necessarily know how to treat it, and if we should treat it. The Neanderthal might react differently to modern medicine than we do, and it would be cruel to bring a new species into the world and not know how to care for its physical well-being.

Additionally, although cloning seems to mean that the DNA of the cloned Neanderthal would be exactly the same as the DNA of the original Neanderthal it was cloned from, that's not completely how it works.

When an organism is cloned, it retains the original nuclear DNA, which accounts for the vast majority of DNA passed on from parent to child, but the mitochondrial DNA is not retained during cloning; rather the mitochondrial DNA would be passed down from the surrogate mother. And, although there are a handful of diseases that can be passed from mother to child through mitochondrial DNA, they are rare and we can expect proper screening would be implemented before the mother of the future Neanderthal clone is impregnated. While mitochondrial DNA only represents a small fraction of DNA, it brings up the question of whether it would really be cloning if a minute fraction of the DNA is passed down from the surrogate human mother to the Neanderthal.

Cloning a Neanderthal is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. Though the technology may exist, no scientific or governmental organization would ever fund it for the aforementioned reasons.

While I would never support the cloning of a Neanderthal, I can't say I wouldn't follow the story if it did ever happen. Despite the many complications and ethical dilemmas, it is a pretty interesting concept, and one that goes to show the power of what science has to offer in the near future.
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