The final line of the paragraph scares me to death - I haven't met a programmer whom I'd turn loose on a DNA construction. It would be like handing a loaded, fully-automatic weapon, with the safety ground off, to a three-year-old; or asking them to complete a fully distributed ERP system written in assembler.
Just because we CAN do something doesn't mean we SHOULD. Perhaps if we constructed a complete corpus of biological effects, and dependencies of all currently known sequences (yeah right, like we're going to sequence every living organism on the planet) we could at least reasonably predict what the effect of NEW sequences might be. Until then the human race is the three-year-old. The gun is loaded. (waiting for the bang...)

Dennis Dumont