It used to be the wildest science fiction, the topic of late-night bull sessions in the dorm room.

It should have stayed that way.

But now, geneticists at the Max Planck laboratories in Leipzig have nearly reached their goal: they have almost completed the first draft of the Neanderthal genome. And you know what that means:

The best way to clone Neanderthals may be to create stem cells that have their DNA. In recent years, geneticists have learned how to take skin cells and return them to a state called pluripotency, where they can become almost any type of cell in the human body. Church proposes to use the MAGE technique to alter a stem cell's DNA to match the Neanderthal genome. That stem cell would be left to reproduce, creating a colony of cells that could be programmed to become any type of cell that existed in the Neanderthal's body. Colonies of heart, brain, and liver cells, or possibly entire organs, could be grown for research purposes.

"I'm convinced that if one were to raise a Neanderthal in a modern human family he would function just like everybody else," says Trenton Holliday, a paleoanthropologist at Tulane University. "I have no reason to doubt he could speak and do all the things that modern humans do."

"I think there would be no question that if you cloned a Neanderthal, that individual would be recognized as having human rights under the Constitution and international treaties," says Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. The law does not define what a human being is, but legal scholars are debating questions of human rights in cases involving genetic engineering. "This is a species-altering event," says Andrews, "it changes the way we are creating a new generation." How much does a human genome need to be changed before the individual created from it is no longer considered human?

But if the Neanderthal has the legal status of a human being, how do you get away with cloning it in the first place?

I'm just cynical enough to believe that if we noble homo sapiens sapiens are capable of persecuting, enslaving and mass-murdering whole swaths of our own species because of trivial differences like skin color or religion or ethnic background, reintroducing the members of an entirely different species is going to open up all kinds of fantastic new opportunities for cruelty, exploitation and genocide.

As a species, we are simply not mature enough, not wise enough, to use this technology responsibly.

I know, I know, that's never stopped us before. But I wish we'd think this one through first. Our species has blood on its hands -- a lot of it. As Shakespeare understood:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

Macbeth, Act II scene ii