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Ian Midgley: Frankenstein-ish scheme to give birth to Neanderthal man is madness

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Now I'm the king of the swingers, a jungle VIP. I've hit the top and had to stop and that's what a-bothering me.

I want to be a man, a man-cub, and stroll right into town.

And be just like the other men. I'm tired of monkeying around.

Now. Let's face it. When you read that first sentence you thought this column was going to be a lot more exciting than it actually is.

Not that King Louis's song from the Jungle Book, where he's trying to talk Mowgli into teaching him the secret of fire, is boring.

It's brilliant.

The only downside to the monkey monarch's grand plan is that he was ahead of his time.

Well, that and the fact he's an animated ape in a Disney cartoon.

But had Louis been around now, the chances are may have been able to become hu-oo-oo-man too-oo-oo.

Step forward Harvard geneticist Professor George Church who this week appealed for an "adventurous" woman who wouldn't mind acting as a surrogate mother for a Neanderthal baby.

That's right, Prof Church believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA from old archeological bones and bring the humanoid species back from extinction.

All he needs to fulfil his Frankenstein-ish scheme is a walking, talking incubator – or a mother as they're otherwise known – and a shop that stocks romper suits for really hairy babies.

My most immediate thought to occur upon hearing this new was: Why, God. Why?

The second thought was: Did we learn nothing from Jurassic Park?

Look what happened when Dickie Attenborough tinkered with extinct dino-DNA – it ended with lots of really angry T-Rexes trying to eat Jeff Goldblum.

Prof Church's belief that we will see Neanderthals walking the Earth again within his lifetime – 33,000 years after they clubbed their last woolly mammoth – instantly propels him to the top of my "scary scientists to keep a close eye on" list, ahead of Dr Mengele, Dr Oppenheimer, Dr No and Carol Vorderman.

In fact, his worrying desire to push scientific boundaries into the realm of playing God is almost exactly like the plot of the classic horror tale The Island Of Doctor Moreau.

That was the one where an insane doctor creates half-man, half-beast creatures on a remote island and, along the way, inadvertently hatched Keith Chegwin. Probably.

There was a reason why Neanderthals died out.

It's a Darwinian survival of the fittest where we came out on top and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (as they were known to their mates) couldn't keep up.

The last thing we need now is a bunch of squat, hairy, cavemen running down Ferensway shouting

"Wilmaaaaaa!" and doing the school run in a car propelled entirely by feet.

The A63's bad enough as it is.

And, to be honest, I'm not entirely convinced that we need to go to all the effort of cloning a new race of Neanderthals.

Anyone who's been on a night out in Grimsby recently will be pretty confident they're still among us.

And I always thought Wayne Rooney had a dodgy paleolithic gait about him.

Prof Church's justification for his monstrous tinkering is that, far from being club-waving brutes, Ug and his wife Uggerina were actually clever, sensitive, imaginative people – a bit like Gok Wan but with back hair.

Their long-lost perspective, he reckons, could one day save us all.

"They might think differently than we do. They could even be more intelligent than us," he says.

"When the time comes to deal with an epidemic, or getting off the planet, it's conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial."

Well Prof. I suppose it's a possibility.

They might also come up with new and exciting ways to cook Pterodactyl – but I doubt it.

The simple truth is: I've got a lot of time for scientists and what they do.

Their ground-breaking research cures diseases, makes my light switches work and flies us to the Moon.

But really, is this something that we should be tinkering with?

This kind of Frankenstein science can only end badly – and make a monkey out of all of us.

• Read Ian Midgley's column Is It Just Me every Wednesday in the Mail.

Ian Midgley: Frankenstein-ish scheme to give birth to Neanderthal man is madness


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