Neanderthal Baby: Surrogate Mother Wanted to Clone Neanderthal Baby

Impact

A Harvard professor of genetics is looking for an "extremely adventurous female human" to serve as surrogate mother for a cloned Neanderthal baby — reported Discovery News.

Dr. George Church is advocating for the procedure as he thinks it'd bring significant benefits to society — such as an increase in genetic diversity. "The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done," Church added.

According to Discovery News, scientists completed the first sequence of the Neanderthal genome in 2010, and found genetic evidence suggesting "ancestors of modern humans successfully interbred with Neanderthals, at least occasionally." 

"The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then ... assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone," Church concluded.