Post by Bozur on Nov 23, 2008 1:19:52 GMT -5
Should we clone a Neanderchimp?
newscientist.com — With a rough draft of the Neanderthal genome due around Christmas season, some reports speculate on the prospect for a Neanderthal-human hybrid or the more ethically palatable chimpanzee-human mashup.More… (General Sciences)
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Should we clone a Neanderchimp?
Michael Crichton would have been proud of science yesterday. When researchers announced the completion of much of the woolly mammoth genome, most of the news stories focused on the prospect of resurrecting the ancient elephants, which went extinct about 5000 years ago.
One author, genomicist Stephan Schuster, estimates that it would cost $10 million to bring mammoths back by modifying elephant DNA to resemble that of mammoths, throw the hybrid genome into an elephant who would bring the beast to term.
"This is something that could work, though it will be tedious and expensive," he told the New York Times.
But why stop there?
A pioneering Russian scientist tried to make human-chimpanzee hybrids in the 1920s, but none of them came to term.
Things have come much further in the last 80 years.
With a rough draft of the Neanderthal genome due around Christmas season, some reports speculate on the prospect for a Neanderthal-human hybrid or the more ethically palatable chimpanzee-human mashup.
"The big issue would be whether enough people felt that a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid would be acceptable, and that would be broadly discussed before anyone started to work on it," said genomicist George Church.
Chimeras -- animals that contain one or many genes from another animal -- are common in basic biology research, but the ancient animal mash-up is a new phenomenon.
Researchers in Australia recently spliced a gene from extinct Tasmanian tigers into mice.
The question then becomes, what other ancient-modern mash-ups can we make?
Dinosaur-birds are a no-brainer, but even with an ostrich, size becomes an issue. A recently discovered half-feathered dinosaur the size of a pigeon might be an ideal place to start.
Few would object to experimenting on the "rats of the sky," which might also be put to use to bring back passenger pigeons.
I'd love to see sabre-tooth tiger DNA cloned into a tiger egg and brought to term. The animal might provide some insight on the newly discovered murder of the Flintstones.
What ancient animal mash-up would you make? I'd go with a ptera-condor.
Ewen Callaway, online reporter
www.newscientist.com/