I received the following email from my sister:

"I just read about this in our newspaper. They have around 80% of Neanderthal DNA decoded already! In the article I read it is not as easy as just taking the DNA and implanting it into an egg whose own DNA has been removed (this same goes for the mammoths). For the mammoths, they think there are 400,000 DNA sites where the mammoth DNA differs from modern elephant DNA. They want to modify successive generations of elephant eggs until they get the DNA makeup of the mammoth, then implant that egg into a host elephant. One of the technical difficulties is being able to modify that many sites in a reasonably amount of time. Right now they can only do one site at a time, but some scientist says he's discovered a way to alter 50,000 sites at a time. If that is true, then it may be feasible.

The Neanderthal would work the same way, except that due to ethical concerns they wouldn't want to use human eggs. In the article it said one possibility was to modify chimpanzee eggs, since our DNA is so similar to begin with, and use a chimpanzee as a host mother.

The article also stated that any extinct species where they could get the whole DNA genome mapped out could potentially be brought back in the same way."


this is what I wrote her back:

"garg! this makes me wanna gack! poor chimp--it's not "unethical" to make a primate give birth to what may be an abomination? I thought Neanderthals were human--wouldn't it be unethical to have a non-human birth one? the poor chimp! she'd have the ugliest baby on record! and wouldn't it really be a chimp-human, not a true Neanderthal? .....ooooooh, I hear scary piano music in the background--shades of The Island of Dr. Moreau! "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_Dr._Moreau