(Image Source: National Geographic ) BY CHRISTIAN BRYANT It’s a story that reads like a Flintstones-era want ad: “Adventurous woman” needed to help clone a Neanderthal baby. Seriously. Harvard University professor of genetics George Church told German news source Der Spiegel he wants to create synthetic DNA and organisms. Using synthetic biology, Church forecasts the possibilities of cloning humans or even Neanderthals. When asked about the prospects of cloning, Church said “The reason I would consider it a possibility is that a bunch of technologies are developing faster than ever before... We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it's very likely that we could clone a human.” Church went on to say that cloning humans would be a prelude to the de-extinction of Neanderthals. You would just need a, quote, “extremely adventurous female human” to bring back Bedrock. But how? According to church, “The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then synthesize these. Finally, you would introduce these chunks into a human stem cell.” As for the why? , Church told sources Neanderthals were intelligent creatures and their way of thinking could be beneficial to present-day humans. But with cloning and stem-cell research being contentious issues, some have taken to outlining the problems in Church’s endeavors. A writer for Forbes said, “One major obstacle to cloning a Neanderthal is a simple fact of the state of cloning: no human being has yet been cloned.” And when mammals have been cloned, they “often experience a host of health problems.” But not all of Church’s work is so “Sci-Fi.” He explained some of the more practical applications on The Colbert Report . Colbert: “Do we need reinventing?” Church: “Some of us have diseases and some of those can actually be changed by changing not only our environment, which is one thing we can change, but also our genetics.” Church says he has more than enough DNA to actually clone a Neanderthal, but it might take time for the technology to catch up with his ambitions.