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Comment by jamessb | Hacker News Reader

Design tool like Cello produces a string of characters representing the sequence of a DNA molecule, not a physical molecule of DNA. To actually do something with this in the real world, you would need to place an order with a DNA Synthesis company (assuming you don't own a DNA synthesizer yourself). Fortunately, these companies screen sequences for things like genes encoding toxins, and work with law enforcement agencies. See for example Marcus Graf's talk at SB6.0: http://sb6.biobricks.org/session/day-2/assessing-risk-managi...

Also, the capabilities of this tool are rather limited. It is not clear to me how being able to design a small combinatorial logic circuit would directly help a potential bioterrorist.

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I'd guess this type of screening only works because we're currently very bad at programming cells. Checking whether a DNA sequence is malicious can't be simpler than checking that a computer program is malicious. And we all know how well that works.

It's arguably easier to check for malicious DNA than malicious computer programs. The motifs for pathogens are pretty common. It's also highly unlikely that someone will create something totally novel, and the experiments required to test malicious properties of a bioagent would be somewhat detectable.

> It is not clear to me how being able to design a small combinatorial logic circuit would directly help a potential bioterrorist.

By advancing this technology.

I assume (hope) we're not yet capable of spitting out DNA out of a USB synthesizer. But given the speed with which technology evolves, it wouldn't be too wild to speculate that 10 or 20 years from now this might become possible.

"I assume (hope) we're not yet capable of spitting out DNA out of a USB synthesizer."

Nope. They're off-the-shelf devices. There's even a used market: http://www.labx.com/dna-synthesizers

It would be really hard to synthesize something of any significant size using these instruments.

Not only the capabilities of this tool are limited - so is our understanding of many of the fundamental concepts that might give us control over the biofactories that are living cells e.g. think protein folding.

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