Sewers

Do you think scientists in the future could make a human out of collected dna sewer waste?

A major city has an unlimited supply dna donations daily to the sewer system. Do you think someday scientist could mix up a sample and somehow clone it into a person. Freaky to think of it and it shouldn't be sone but do you think they could?

Public Comments

1. Anything's possible, but to me it would seem extremely unfeasible; it'd take so much money, time and effort that I doubt anyone would go to the trouble (not to mention any ethical/moral concerns). I mean, first they'd need to make sure they had a complete genome (i.e. intact fragments of DNA that contained all the DNA in each chromosome of a human -- a lot of DNA). Also, it wouldn't be trivial as when it's not protected in a nucleus, it has a tendency to break apart, so you'd have to put all the piece back together and in the right order. Even then, for the genetic code to mean anything, it has to be in the context of a living cell. Even if you were able to transfer it into a living cell, there are lots of chemical modifications that are made to DNA that are important for its function as well as tons of different proteins that make DNA work as it's meant to. So yeah, with modern technology, it would be crazy difficult to do it and ludicrously impractical.
2. DNA is DNA. As long as the DNA is intact, it doesn't matter where it came from. The problem is more about the difficulty of finding a molecule of human DNA in an ocean of waste, and second, whether that DNA would survive intact in such an environment (it would seem unlikely). So it is conceivable to do ... but there seems to be little reason to go through the trouble when there will be far more convenient and less DNA-hostile environments in which to find it ... like living humans. If there are no living humans, then there won't be much human DNA in the sewer system (or a sewer system to begin with).