for those of you interested in programming, it's just been taken a step further:
QuoteSynthetic biology aims at producing novel biological systems to carry out some desired and well-defined functions. An ultimate dream is to design these systems at a high level of abstraction using engineering-based tools and programming languages, press a button, and have the design translated to DNA sequences that can be synthesised and put to work in living cells.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/gec/
i'm really interested in what they'll do with this and how they will progress. with any luck we might just save ourselves from ourselves with technological life or implants into the human body (and if this is the technological singularity we're headed against, then oh shit).