Playing God with Neanderthals

A good model may be feral children. These are children who have serious social handicaps due to childhood trauma or lack of contact with other humans during early development. These children may very well lack the social skills and cognitive skills that neanderthals would lack in an H. sapien culture. Scientists and psychologists are able to study these children in an ethical and respectful manner, and I don't see why neanderthals could not be studied in a similar fashion.The difference here is that no scientist is purposefully creating feral children. This has been a long running ethical divide in science. What we can do does not line up with what we should do.

The easy, but still controversial, remedy would be forced sterilization (e.g. vasectomy). This was once standard for those with Down syndrome, and I wouldn't be surprised if this still occurred.Just as an interesting aside, I watched a show a while back that dealt with feral children. The observation was that there are important stages in child development that require human contact. If children do not have contact with other humans during this time they will be permanantly disabled. One scientist had the idea of seeing what happened if a chimp was raised as a human would be. He raised a chimp alongside his own child. The experiment came to a screeching halt because of an unexpected result. The chimp didn't act any differently, but the scientist's child started acting like a chimp. It could be that we are looking at this from the wrong direction. Modern humans may be just as much a part of this experiment as the neanderthal child. This experiment may end up telling us more about ourselves than it does about neanderthals. Some would argue that we already are. There is some genetic evidence that modern H. sap carries a limited set of neanderthal genes due to interbreeding between archaic H sap and neanderthals. However, the lack of a surviving neanderthal mitochondrial lineage rules out a direct female ancestor in modern H. sap populations.

Even with tubal ligation or vasectomies it is still possible to harvest gametes and allow a natural child birth. The fertilization may be in vitro, but the rest of the process could be 100% in vivo.Further down the line someone may very well produce a modern human-neanderthal hybrid. From there we could reassess whether or not interbreeding would be safe. They would be 100% neanderthal, assuming the reconstruction prior to cloning is accurate. They wouldn't be a new species any more than a wolf raised from a pup around humans would be a new species. There are methodological issues here. With the technology we have it is easier to create a new strand de novo with the needed sequence than it is to specifically mutate a section of chimp or human DNA.As to "Why neanderthal?", we don't have any other genomes to study. There is no surviving H. erectus, H. habilis, or even H. floresiensis DNA to study. Scientists would be equally interested in these genomes, but they are lost to history. What neanderthals can show us is the last baby steps to becoming the species we are today. That has always been an interest of humanity since we first started being curious about the natural world. Aren't we changing that right now? I don't have any numbers to back me up, but I think it is safe to assume that interbreeding between classic human groups has increased dramatically in the last 50 years. Our own US president is a perfect example. Are you suggesting that we should stop interracial marriages?

Yes, they are sentient beings like us. There is a long history within bioethics of extending more rights to sentient species than to those considered to be less sentient. In biomedical research there are different rules for experiments done on fish, mice, dogs, and primates. All four of these groups have different rules with primates receiving the most rights.Also, there are obvious questions as to health risks that we may be exposing a neanderthal to through the process of DNA reconstruction. Many of the cloned animals we have produced suffer from health problems related to the procedure.

No, it is a matter of human empathy, our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes. If a species is not like us we lack empathy for those creatures. As a rule, humans feel much more empathy for a mouse killed in a trap than a roach squished under their heel.

No, it is how our empathic abilities work. It is how our brain works. If we can't understand how a species thinks, feels emotion, etc. then we have little empathy for them. Primates are the most protected group within scientific experimentation because we can better recognize how they think and display emotion. If we state that it is wrong to cause a human pain because we dislike that pain ourselves then we must also extend those rights to species that feel pain like we do.Think about it. Do we farm chimps for meat? I think everyone would cringe at the idea. So why not the same reaction for cattle, sheep, chickens, and pigs?

Would they have an even stronger reaction to the farming of chimps? What about extending those rights to plants and bacteria? Isn't it just as arrogant to extend these rights just to animals?

A pharmaceutical company has developed a compound that kills a broad spectrum of bacteria in standard cultures with a very low incidence of resistance. This same drug also kills bacteria that are resistant to other antibiotics. However, the scientists at the company have no idea if it is toxic in humans. What should they do first?1. Expose plants to the drug.2. Expose mice to the drug.3. Expose chimps to the drug.4. Expose humans to the drug.5. Never test the drug and never release it while millions of people die from bacterial infections.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

Why not start with chimps or human volunteers?

The first thing that popped into my head was someone asking Werner von Braun if he wanted to go up in the first manned flights. I imagine his response would have been "Hell No!!", or the German equivalent.

It is a question of whether or not we punish those who violate those rights.

If you are going to argue that rights are inherent and inalienable then how can they be "applied"? What do you mean by this?And how are we going to stop people from violating the rights of others if not through the threat of punishment? Isn't it arrogant of you to decide for everyone what is and is not egocentric?

If a drug is toxic for mice more than likely it is also toxic in humans. If a drug is not toxic in mice there is no guarantee that it is not toxic in humans. Just to give you an idea of how these things are currently handled in biomedical research . . .In bioethics this is a grey area. The Hippocratic Oath states that you should first do no harm. Giving a patient an untested drug of unknown toxicity flies in the face of this oath. Also, the rules for human subjects in scientific research place a lot of stress on recognizing compromised subjects, those subjects who may be unduly pressured by circumstance to participate in scientific experiments. In most cases, giving untested drugs to terminally ill patients crosses this line because the subjects are desparate and may participate in experiments that are too risky. However, an independent review board can ok these types of studies, but they usually require at least some toxicity testing in non-primate mammalian species first (e.g. mice, rats).

You still run the risk of increasing pain and suffering as well as taking away time that the patient has very little left of. All of these factors are weighed when testing highly experimental drugs in terminally ill patients. That is certainly worth discussing.For non-humans we do not look at it in terms of consent since none can be given. Instead, the use of animals is justified by the knowledge that can be gained in the experiments. Those justifications are reviewed by various independent committees usually called Institutional Review Boards (IRB's). At least in the US, an IRB is required to have at leats one person from the community on the board with voting power. We have a pastor from a local church on our IRB. The IRB reviews the animal protocols for adherence to regulations as well as judging whether or not the suffering and/or death of the animals is justified by the knowledge that the experiments will uncover. They also look at the experimental protocols to see if suffering is kept to a minimum. This same IRB also reviews experiments that involve humans.Do you think this should be approached differently? If so, how?

Like I said above, there is the Hippocratic Oath to consider. The first rule of Doctor Club is "do no harm". The second rule of Doctor Club . . . well, you get the idea. Secondly, terminally ill patients are not as objective about the risks. I am not saying that this type of testing should not occur. In fact, this type of testing has been done and is being done in very limited clinical trials. What I am saying is that you have to be very, very careful in how these trials are conducted and in how you get consent to run these experiments. If at all possible, these types of studies should be avoided.From my understanding, a drug has to at least show promise in animal studies before it can be considered for these types of clinical trials in terminally ill patients, even if that drug has unknown or even known toxicity in animal or human models. Bias is the right word. There is a bias towards non-primate species in animal testing.What sane, non-terminally ill human would consent to a study that might kill them or cause permanent damage? I think it is immoral to even ask people to participate in such a study, especially when the good data can be acquired through animal studies. There are even experiments where the subject is expected to suffer and/or die, such as finding the right dose of antibiotics for fighting massive infections.