Why Not Bring a Neanderthal to Life?

I’m bracing for a long list of objections from the world’s self-appointed keepers of bioethics

Good. Brace yourself, Mr. Tierney.

First, let's do a little googling. Find, for example, this article: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/baby/clon_silver.html

It's perfectly clear that if cloning works in every other mammal in which it's been tried, it will work in human beings. But at the moment, there is a pretty high frequency of birth defects in these other animals. There are a large number of cloned calves that are born too big and have health problems. As long as that frequency of birth defects is high, and we can't control it, then it would be unethical to use this technology to try to bring about the birth of a child.

OK. So let's pretend you could find a human carrier to gestate your transgenic Neanderthal baby for you.

And let's pretend that in course of trying figuring out how to bring a Neanderthal baby to term, 50% abort spontaneously in the third trimester.

Let's pretend that in the course of trying to get a Neanderthal baby to the age of 18, 50% die of various congenital malformations.

Let's pretend that a Neanderthal is at least as self aware as a homo sapiens with Down Syndrome.

Now, let's spend your $30 million elsewhere, please.

God, what a trollish article. But it worked on me.

This is the kind of article that actually scares people and gets them confused about something relatively innocuous, like stem cells. I have flipped the bozo bit on this guy. And if George Church is really in favor of this idea, I'll flip the bozo bit on him, too.

It's an interesting idea, but I dont think we are ready yet, either scientifically or ethically.

Real answer: I think the problems implicit in cloning are foremost. Assuming we're able to surpass those, we have the inherent ethical issues of bringing a human-like (and possibly more complex/intelligent than humans) being into a very strange environment.

I think we should do it, if we can guarantee a reasonable likelihood that he or she will not endure an inhuman amount of suffering, but there are a lot of ethical issues that have to be addressed. Who will raise him? How hard will we try to give him a "normal" life and prevent his inevitable celebrity from affecting him? How will we determine if he's competent to own property, attend school, live on his own, etc.?