[ejstronge]

> That is if we transfer the DNA to an advanced alien civilization - would they be able to make a human.

You'd need a cell to start the process, with the various nucleic acids distributed correctly and proteins/energy with which to create further proteins using the information encoded by the DNA. Thus the civilization would need information about cells and a set of building blocks before being able to use the DNA.

[borissk]

The DNA contains all the code that creates and regulates the proteins.

[penteract]

Including code for the proteins that read DNA to produce proteins. You might hit similar problems trying to understand C given the source code for a C compiler - a non-standard environment could reproduce itself given the source code, meaning the code alone doesn't strictly determine the output.

[kibibyte]

I'll torture this DNA and C source code analogy a bit.

Epigenetics is missing in this discussion about reproducing a human from just the DNA. These are superficial modifications (e.g. methylation, histone modification, repressor factors) to a strand of DNA that can drastically alter how specific regions get expressed into proteins. These mechanisms essentially work by either hiding or unhiding DNA from RNA polymerases and other parts of the transcription complex. These mechanisms can change throughout your lifetime because of environmental factors and can be inherited.

So it's like reading C source code, except there so many of these inscrutable C preprocessor directives strewn all throughout. You won't get a successful compilation by turning on or off all the directives. Instead, you need to get this similarly inscrutable configuration blob that tells you how to set each directive.

I guess in a way, it's like the weights for an ML model. It just works, you can't explain why it works, and changing this weight here produces a program that crashes prematurely, and changing a weight there produces a program with allergic reactions to everything.

[pfdietz]

There's also postprocessing: varying modification of the RNA, RNA interference, glycosylation and other post transcriptional modifications.

[khazhoux]

And how will you decode it?