News: News Archives Scientists Decode Dead Sea Scrolls with DNA
and Infrared Digital Photography Digital (top) and digital
infrared images of the Genesis Apocryphon [Photographed by
Michael Maggen, Paper Conservation Laboratory; Copyright the
Israel Museum Jerusalem] Sixty years after the accidental
discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls by a Bedouin shepherd in the
caves of Qumran, powerful technologies like infrared digital
photography and DNA analysis are helping scientists piece
together more than 40,000 fragments of the ancient manuscripts.
The work is offering a glimpse into the foundations of
monotheism and its early adherents, a top scrolls scholar said
at AAAS. In a lecture sponsored by the AAAS Dialogue on Science,
Ethics, and Religion (DoSER), Adolfo Roitman, curator of the
Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, told a
packed auditorium that while many texts were well-preserved in
the dry Judean desert air, scientists were forced to turn to DNA
analysis to assemble the ancient fragments i