funny. I tend to have a low opinion of bioinformatics[0] (no personal offense intended), and I do think of DNA as a programming language (I'm a synthetic biologist).

[0] only because so many times I've relied on the bioinformatic analysis/annotations and actually figured out what was going on by looking at it by myself, and then thought, goddammit, if the bioinformatician ever spent time in the wetlab they'd never have missed this! Not saying that a wetlabber could have competently written a script either (they'd either be too dumb to or too lazy to - that's what informaticians are for). Anecdotally, Ham Smith and Clyde Hutchison, used to write their own fortran programs for identifying promoters, ORFs, and what not. A few weeks ago, they realized they had totally screwed up an analysis because the excel sheet of ORFs they had was mapped to the wrong sequence by the bioinformatician they handed it over to...

Thanks for this article, insightful AND funny: teaching people is not compatible with being enjoyable to read... Of course DNA is not a programming language, And of course analogies are never exact, but in the end if the reader has grasped some parts of the concepts, why should we forbid them ? In the end, it looks like sense of humour is not as universal as we may want it to be.