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DNA isn't enough to revive a species. | |
Posted By: LietLives | Date: 6/29/04 11:36 p.m. |
In Response To: Re: heres my problem.. (Zaknafein) : If the Forerunner could use the DNA replace the several different species
Just because you have DNA doesn't mean you can recreate a species, or even a single organism. Remember Dolly, the cloned sheep? The DNA was extracted from the adult cells a female sheep, then inserted into an egg produced by that same sheep that had had its own, haploid, DNA removed. After several failures, they finally managed to get one clone, which had half the life span! DNA is not the end all, be all to understanding life. It is one crucial part of living chemistry among many, many others. Remember, most human DNA is "junk", unused base pairs that are not "read" by RNA to produce proteins. DNA is only the blueprint. It has to be copied by a cell in order to reproduce, and it is used as a template for one step in the creation of proteins. By itself, it's just a huge protein with some funky embelishments. If you took the DNA from the Flood, what kind of cell would you put it in? Unless you placed it in a Flood cell, the RNA of the new cell could easily read the wrong parts of the DNA, in accordance with its own processes, and you would not get the organism you were trying to produce. Just moving a gene can have disasterous effects, and that doesn't even require changing the base pair sequence, just moving it away from where the place where it codes for something useful. And don't forget that eukaryotic cells aren't actually a single organism. Mitochodria have their own DNA, which is not part of the reproduction of the rest of the cell. They are essentially a foreign organism existing within the eukaryotic cell. There is no evidence that Flood are or are not eukaryotes, but if they were, and you removed the DNA from one and later implanted it into another kind of cell, it could be lacking important organelles necessary for the cell to function. So basically, DNA does not an organism make. |
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