This is one of the great questions that science has raised this week and that has raised the great contradictions that scientific research has with what is fair and moral to ask: Will a Neanderthal be born in the 21st century?
Will a Neanderthal child be born?
My anthropologist's heart has turned around when reading this news, it has been announced that a scientist at Harvard University, Dr. George Church, said that it would be possible to create a Neanderthal and for a woman to gestate.
The news was born from an interview granted to the German publication Spiegel although Professor Church has already clarified that it is not a really ongoing project but that he had only said that it would be theoretically feasible. To understand our closest cousins, interact with one of them, better understand the essence that makes us who we are. It is fascinating, but is it ethical?
My mother's heart has stirred with horror. Genetic research can help us a lot, but this would be an eyesore. A human child, with intelligence and feelings, created as a research project. His life would become a laboratory experiment, his emotional development, his own existence, would become a disgrace.
I can't conceive more terrible monstrosity. Be gestated by a mother who will not be her mother, be used for testing and observation, as they do with animals.
“The ugly boy” already advanced this controversy in 1958
I immediately remembered a story by Asimov, "The ugly boy." It tells what happens when a Neanderthal child is taken to the present to investigate it (in this case thanks to a time machine). It is a story of intense emotionality and that, in 1958, raised this ethical and scientific dilemma.
A Neanderthal child needs what any child
A person needs his family, his environment, his freedom and integral development. And a child created in this way could never have him, he would be an outsider among us, always under the astonished gaze of others, always in the hands of what others did of him. Should we, if it were to become fully possible in practice, do born a Neanderthal in the 21st century?
The ethical debate around genetic manipulation and surrogate mothers
This opens up an ethical debate of enormous depth that includes the use of surrogate mothers, something increasingly widespread, and the children's own use as a product to pay for or with which to investigate.
But we should even ask ourselves if we can continue to use our cousins primates, beings of enormous intelligence and sensitivity, as objects that torture, sell or analyze by destroying their normal life, as we are raised, for example, with the Great Ape Project or with the story of the Koko gorilla, able to communicate with sign language.
Neanderthals were human beings
The Neanderthals they died out about 28,000 years ago, although this issue is still investigated as our Xatakaciencia colleagues told us. They had lived in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa for over 200,000 years. It is not clear if its extinction was caused by the Sapiens Sapiens (us) or if the root cause was climate change.
They were adapted to cold climates, were robust and hunters. And they seemed so similar to us that we might not realize if one were our neighbor. Neanderthals were human beings.
They had culture, understood as a complex of transmission of paleolithic techniques (Musteriense), special burials for their dead and, possibly, rock art. The Neanderthals Not only were they human but they were not "inferior."
Although they were not of our same species they had an intense social and emotional life, even everything indicates that they communicated on the same level as us and it could even be that they spoke with an articulated language, although in this matter there is still an intense debate.
They were so close to us that their lineage was even considered to be crossed with that of Sapiens Sapiens in a hybridization process. A Neanderthal child would look a lot like what a human child sapiens sapiens needs.
Science and ethics around the Neanderthal child
The Max Planc Institute in Leipizg develops an in-depth investigation into the Neanderthal genome and has made enormous progress in its understanding, as published in the journal Science in 2010, so, although not yet developed enough technical expertise, perhaps in a near future becomes viable what Professor Church advanced: that a Neanderthal child is born by genetic manipulation and be gestated by a woman. What opinion do you have of this?
