Image via flickr/hariymuseummatt

A Professor and Geneticist at Harvard Medical School has extracted a sufficient amount of Neanderthal DNA from fossils to potentially recreate mankind’s long lost ancestor.

In order to do so however, he would need a willing female volunteer to be inseminated with a genetically engineered fetus. Professor George Church would “introduce parts of the Neanderthal genome to human stem cells and clone them to create a foetus that could then be implanted in a woman” claims the Telegraph.

This type of cloning is illegal in many countries, Canada included, but despite the controversy associated with cloning humans, Church, a respected scholar in his field, believes replicating Neanderthals could help us figure out how to engineer our cells to be less susceptible to cancer and to aging.

As insane as the idea of inseminating yourself with a Neanderthal fetus may be, science has seen such crazy self-experimentation in the past. German Physican Werner Forssmann developed a process for cardiac catheterization by trying it on himself, and Australian doctor Barry Marshall discovered a bacteria that causes stomach ulcers by infecting himself with it on purpose. Both of them won Nobel prizes.

[via The Guardian and The Telegraph]

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Eva Voinigescu is an intern at Toronto Standard. Follow her on Twitter @EvaVoinigescu.

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