So you can write a computer program to a bacterium. Then you can sequence it and the code goes back to being stored on a computer.

But it ends there - the code never gets executed again. FASTA files are just text files that would rarely have executable permissions and never actually be executed by a user. Most boring and uneventful outbreak ever.

If I can infect a common fly with my stenographed, encrypted message, then I can communicate with people in China! I can translate our major books in every language and hide that data in cockroaches! If we ever nuke ourselves so badly that we only have people living in bunkers, then maybe one day they will discover that we hid all of our knowledge in life! Maybe this has already happened! Maybe aliens did so with mathematical proofs when they discovered our world an eternity ago!

I reject your claim of boring! THIS IS AMAZING!

"Any sufficiently advanced compression or encoding is indistinguishable from /dev/null"

Edit: beat by 3 minutes and a stale cached page.

[0]http://www.sgidna.com/translator.php [1]http://dna.macrogen.com/eng/service/seq/standard/standardseq...

edit: Let me add that I think this is crazy interesting and even if the DNA is never executable itself, it's a very very interesting way to store a program that can later be extracted.

It did bring up some concerns, though -- do we now have mail-order anthrax manufacturing? This isn't something I'm seriously worried about, but it does seem like something to consider in the future as this technology evolves.

Something else I just thought of while typing this is that this would make an awesomely sci-fi means of information storage. No need to remember a password, we've encoded your gut flora with your private key!

Was the first thing that occurred to me too. Talk about steganography.

First occurred to me as interesting too. Then I realized that you'd be dropping your private key in every toilet you defecate into. Not to say that secure intra-body information storage isn't possible though.

Then again, re: the steganography -- gut flora's pretty diverse (and there's a lot of it). People might not necessarily think to, or want to, dig through your shit.

A serious discussion of this concept would involve encoding the information with some sort of channel coding and calculating the likelihood of any such program of minimal length successfully propagating itself.

Could it be possible for someone to take a corporate secret or information, translate it into DNA, incorporate the DNA into a virus, and then infect themselves with said virus? While they are incubating say, the common cold, they could be in physical transit to their destination with no electronic device. The virus could ultimately be extracted and it's information sold to the highest bidder.

Actually, it sort of reminds me of a novel by Alan Dean Foster - Sagramanda http://www.amazon.com/Sagramanda-A-Novel-Near-Future-India/d...

Anyway, those areas you guys are calling non-coding and "junk" do a lot more than we understand, and I would venture modifying them willy nilly could have some pretty nasty outcomes.

On non-coding regions, we are indeed learning more and more, but these developments are relatively recent and there is much more to be discovered.

As for the grey goo... well, that would be quite the singularity, wouldn't it?

Genetic manipulation is typically done at a much smaller scale, and not by exchanging an entire genome. And on a small scale it would be very unlikely that such a switch would go unnoticed.

The way back from bacterium to executable is also extremely unlikely, there would be enough mutations after some generations that the program is unlikely to run at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_Revelation_Space#...

Should have used UTF-8. Also human letters does not equal greco-roman capital letters. Wake me when they embed some kanji.

kanji -> UTF-8 -> Binary -> DNA.

"U PLUS SIGN F EIGHT E FOUR" is the glyph for Klingon TLH.

Or more likely given the limited codespace its actually:

"U PLUS SIGN F VIII E IV" is the glyph for Klingon TLH

"real" unicode support would look like an imaginary packed UTF-5bit rather than existing UTF-8 or a roman letter prose description of UTF-8

As a meta discussion, much as being able to encode arbitrary text including source and executables "proves" that bio-mechanical DNA virii are possible, I guess this post where Klingon glyphs can be described in someone elses roman letter glyphs in earth DNA also "proves" that inter species human klingon romance and reproduction is viable (I'm sure to the relief of Lt Paris and Lt B'Lenna).

(edited to add because of codon degeneracy I'm claiming we should only pack 5 binary bits per codon, I know there's 6 theoretical bits per codon and only (about) 4 bits of amino acid per codon so I split the difference and went for 5. Its an interesting puzzle, do you allow any codon even if its biologically nonsense or are you writing a distinct amino acid alphabet using the codon as a representation of the amino acids?)

Scientists shouldn't be rushing with this kind of thing (research for sake of research), and we, as humanity, should carefully consider the implication of this kind of things.

Btw, this reminds me of the old game called Core Wars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War).