Harvard Professor denies ‘Neanderthal Clone’ project

12:33, 23 January 2013

WASHINGTON. January 22. KAZINFORM A renowned Harvard University professor was forced Tuesday to deny he was planning to clone a Neanderthal hominid after news stories to this effect went viral on the internet based on an erroneous reading of remarks he made to a German magazine, RIA Novosti reported.

"I'm certainly not advocating it," Harvard geneticist George Church told the Boston Herald after many of the most respected US media brands including NBC News, CBS News, Fox News, Yahoo and the Huffington Post ran with stories based on an interview with German weekly Der Spiegel.

In an email to RIA Novosti, Church made clear his comments evoking the theoretical possibility of cloning a Neanderthal had been misinterpreted by other media as a practical intention. He referred readers to the Boston Herald for his efforts to clear up the misunderstanding.

"The real story here is how these stories have percolated and changed in different ways," said Church, one of the initiators of the Human Genome Project, a landmark scientific undertaking aimed at identifying and mapping the genes in human DNA.

Science