Scientists Plan to Rebuild Neanderthal Genome

If the following story is to be believed then it could be an absolutely fantastically awesome achievement.

Scientists Plan to Rebuild Neanderthal Genome

In a nutshell we plan to reconstruct DNA taken from a bone 45,000 years old. The DNA is fragmented and so will need some major work to reconstruct, but it is possible.

Where could this lead??

I can see that the basis for understanding our development has been taken from past fossil records, but what about actually studying the live animal.

If it could be possible to reconstruct the DNA of a Neanderthal, then what would stop us from using this DNA to create a live animal through the same techniques used in cloning??

Just image the sort of questions we could answer if we could actually study a branch of our history that we know so little about.

I wonder if a live Neanderthal living in today’s environment would have the capacity to comprehend our every day life or if it is somehow biologically beyond its bounds??

I mean to say that Neanderthals for all we know could have had quite a decent intelligence, they simply did not have sufficient cultural technological knowledge to achieve much in past history.

This could answer the time old question of what happened to the Neanderthal? And what are the origins of the homo sapiens?

All the best,

NeoN HaZe.

gosh!!! not a single reply???

Well, I think it's a cool thing. We just need to be sure that we don't end up being destroyed by our own creation. Ala Planet of the apes or, Cro-magnon invaders from Sliders.


-ADHD

Ah-ha, it occurrs to me that the universal soldier won't be some
expensive human-cyborg amalgamation...

it will be neanderthals

perhaps those internment camps the gov't is supposed to have
will be camps for human mothers with petri-dish eggs fertilized
with this neanderthal genome, nuclear DNA

whoa....

My issue:

let's say it's missing a huge chunk somewhere.

What should we use as filler DNA? Human or Chimp DNA? A lot of what we know about Neanderhtals is guesswork, so we wouldn't know which to use for eyes, lips, etc.

What would wind up happening is that we'll guess wrong and ahve either a Human with little abnormailities, or a Chimp with little abnormalities.

No such thing as reconstruction unless the gaps are few and far between.

I wonder if a live Neanderthal living in today’s environment would have the capacity to comprehend our every day life or if it is somehow biologically beyond its bounds??

Well the Neanderthal did have a larger brain then us at the time that we co-existed on this planet so I doubt it wouldn't take it that long to get used to it. It's not as if we are plucking one of these guys from the past and putting them in the middle of Times Square without so much as a Tutorial on modern life. If they are brought up in such an environment, then they should probably be nearly as adept at Urban Survival as we are.

The larger issue would be, is it ethical to keep a one of these creatures in captivity after they are created? What we are basically proposing is re-creating a Verifiable Sentient Species who may possibly even learn to talk. Think about that for a second. A Genus completely seperate from ours sharing our planet with us again for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years! It's almost as if we found Intelligent life on Mars or something that is how significant such a creation would be!

Well perhaps what the scientist are doing is to bring and prof the issue of the missing link. . .

With a live specimen then it would be easy to see where it actually the missing link went missing.

I know that was a lil joke, but for accuracies sake Neandrethals aren't directly related to us. Their branch is parellel to ours and not part of the same branch.

I really don't think this is even a possibilty. Sure, they could probably clone something from the degraded neanderthal DNA, but there is one catch. What about the HOX sequences? These sequences are what determine the chemical gradients that aid in embryological development. They are repeated a set number of times in each organism, and these repeats are based on random mutations throughout an organisms evolution. As a comparison, many fish and reptiles have more HOX sequence repeats than humans as those fish and reptiles have been around much longer than humans.

It's basically like this. Try to read the following sentence and fill in the gaps based only on the knowledge that it will resemble a complete sentence, and there can be more than one word in each black (just as there could be more than one HOX repeat in each DNA gap):

My favorite fruit is _____ because it is ____ and ____.

Now, how many combinations are there? Am I saying my favorite fruit is pineapple because it's yellow and sweet? Or am I saying my favorite fruit is a grape because it is small, round, purple or green, sweet, and comes in bunches? See how the second version was drastically longer than the first, and definitely had an impact on my answer?

Same goes for HOX. Leaving out one HOX sequence could produce either nothing (it would terminate before neurulation most likely) or an organism not at all like a true neanderthal.

For now, I think this will remain in the same realm as the failed attempts at cloning the mammoth.

Mariella