The “what could go wrong” phase

Harvard geneticist George Church recently told Der Spiegel he’s close to developing the necessary technology to clone a Neanderthal, at which point all he’d need is an ‘adventurous human woman’ to be a surrogate mother for the first Neanderthal baby to be born in 30,000 years (article in German, translation to English). Church said, ’We have lots of Neanderthal parts around the lab. We are creating Neanderthal cells. Let’s say someone has a healthy, normal Neanderthal baby. Well, then, everyone will want to have a Neanderthal kid. Were they superstrong or supersmart? Who knows? But there’s one way to find out. (source)

Coming soon to an island off the coast of Costa Rica “Neanderthal Park.’

While the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton was of course fictional the arrogance of the scientists within it is not. I’ve got Neanderthal parts around the lab, just add an adventurous human woman and all is set. No evil maniacal laugh, just an attitude where the human person can become a laboratory and just a convenient incubator for an experiment. The ethics of scientism comes down only to “what is possible.”