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Comment by burnte | Hacker News Reader

Not a dumb question. No, we can't clone it. It will be an incomplete genome, it's just a subset of the animal's entire DNA sequence, and it's reconstructed from proteins. We've recovered some words from the ashes, and so we can tell what language the book was in, and where in history that book fits in with the language (comparing those words with other books with similar words), but we can't reconstruct the whole book yet.

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> We've recovered some words from the ashes, and so we can tell what language the book was in, and where in history that book fits in with the language (comparing those words with other books with similar words), but we can't reconstruct the whole book yet.

If they had other teeth (from the same specimen or different ones of the same species), would they be able to just combine them to fill in the gaps?

To follow your metaphor, to me this sounds like finding different copies of the same printing, same edition, same book and combining them all to make a complete book. Does the metaphor fall apart?

Consider the size of the DNA "books": for example, the human genome is around 3 GB (uncompressed), much bigger than a single book on your shelf: King James Bible as plain text is around 4 MB (uncompressed), so it's a factor of roughly 1000 times (being always copied in every cell of your body!) and we have many complete copies and versions of older bibles but we still can't completely reconstruct too old versions. But we can have a reasonable reconstruction of the "tree" of the development of the known bibles.

And having just a single page from a bible can tell you quite good where that bible fits in the tree of all known bibles.

Thank you! I hadn't considered the size or amount missing from a given "book," that makes it much clearer.

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