Tng

It occurred to me as I was watching Star Trek that, with their transporter technology, they should be able to make perfect copies of all of their officers. Now it's not much of a problem 'cause no one dies in TNG, but in the original series people died all the time on missions to the planet, literally minutes after their bodies were converted into energy and back into matter by the transporter system. I can't see how it would work if the system didn't know how to convert them to data somehow (someone feel free to correct me if this came up sometime), so I don't get why they couldn't just replicate those killed on away missions. Except that that would virtually eliminate the threat of death and make the series boring.