Count Dracula is an imaginary figure created by Bram Stoker in 1897. The subject from which the writer was inspired, however, seems to be Vlad III of Wallachia, also called Vlad the Impaler (but not only), who had a reputation as a cruel and bloodthirsty man. Now scientists are trying to extract his DNA.
No, don’t worry, Insiders don’t want to clone the Impalerbut they just want “build a picture of the physical makeup of the Wallachian warlord and also get an idea of the climatic conditions in which he lived.“
Nowadays, in fact, technology manages to recreate a person’s physical attributes using only a sample of his genetic code: gender, eye color, hair color, complexion, freckles, tendency to overweight and also some facial features and dimensions with a certain likelihood.
Scientists, precisely, claim to have managed the extraction of biochemical traces from a letter signed by Vlad the Impaler where molecules such as proteins and metabolites have been found. “These molecules are more stable than DNA and provide more information on the environmental conditions, health, lifestyle, nutrition of the historical person“, Gleb and Svetlana Zilberstein finally tell The Guardian.
With DNA, think, it was even possible to reconstruct the portrait of a Neanderthal family.
