Biocodicology - A Deeper Dive

[Mark Knowles]

Someone would have to sample every millimeter of every page, including the edges and the interior of the spine, the sewing stations, the sewing threads, the binding, etc.

Why would that be necessary? I don't understand that. 

I would expect there would be DNA, maybe lots of it, from a given scribe on a given page on which that scribe had written. I am not an expert on this, so it seems conceivable that lots of the scribe's DNA would be so degraded by now as to be non-recoverable. However it seems to be more plausible that there is lots of largely intact long strand DNA molecules from all of the scribes distributed all over the manuscript pages. In fact the scribes would have had more close contact with the manuscript than most likely any other individual, so one would think they would have deposited more DNA than anyone else and in places where others might not have deposited DNA.

I found this article from the Atlantic

"Sampling DNA From a 1,000-Year-Old Illuminated Manuscript
Genetic analysis could revolutionize the study of medieval books.

By Sarah Zhang"

To quote from the article:

"Remarkably, the authors say they extracted all this DNA without destroying even a tiny piece of parchment. All they needed were the crumbs from rubbing the book with erasers, which conservationists routinely use to clean manuscripts."

From this article it appears that DNA can be extracted from a manuscript with no significant damage to the manuscript. Now this refers to animal skin, but I don't see why this could apply to human DNA as one would expect them to be intermingled.

Even when the sample-gathering is minimally destructive, it is still destructive, especially if portions with ink and pigment are going to be sampled. It is simply unimaginable that those entrusted with the care and preservation of this object would allow it. The manuscript is very, very fragile, especially the fold-outs and the Rose, which can no longer be safely opened without risk of tearing. The potential for actionable results is much too remote to risk damaging the manuscript.

That may well be, I certainly can't comment on the state of the manuscript or what those in possession of the manuscript would allow, though I note that the Carbon Dating and ink analysis was allowed which could well be more damaging to the manuscript.