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There's no biosafety level 5, it only goes up to four.

More importantly, no to the rest of it.These are not going to be living things, they're going to be dried nucleotides on paper most likely. There is going to be no transcription or translation and creation of proteins. First of all that's much more difficult and doesn't happen on its own. Second that would defeat the point of data storage. Having the DNA doing stuff would cause its degradation and loss.

It's like saying "don't download that encyclopedia on that external hard drive! It might achieve sentience!" Nothing is happening to the data either way, and in both cases, making "life" would be impossible.

Life requires a lot more than DNA. There are some plant viruses IIRC that can reproduce simply by injecting their DNA or RNA sequence into plant cells. But I didn't hear about any such human viruses. Viruses require protein machinery to take over the cell in addition to their DNA. You synthesize the smallpox genome and inject it into your veins, you're not going to develop smallpox.

... I mean, I wouldn't try that myself, but my fears over doing that are purely illogical.

The smallpox genome is also a 186 kilobase sequence. It's not something that's sure to show up with much frequency even if all the DNA in MS's storage were to get into your cells. If anyone knows a way of calculating how much DNA you'd need to synthesize at random before you came up with those specific 186000 nucleotides, I'd be very interested, but I'm guessing it's a lot.

Finally, synthesizing nucleotides is old hat. The scale and cost is the new thing here. You want to synthesize a smallpox genome? You can do that already. There aren't even any laws against it yet! It's going to cost you a lot and again, DNA itself wouldn't do shit besides freak people out, but you can. It'd be much easier just to find smallpox itself. But either way, there's nothing completely new here besides it's now cheap and fast enough to consider doing for data storage.

Quit getting spooked by biology.

I don't have access (I miss being able to read every paper I wanted when I was in college...), but that's not necessarily true. Multiplex qPCR (TaqMan, not SYBR) can use a number of different probes with a number of different, uniquely fluorescing fluorophores. Depending on how their method works, you may be able to adapt the protocol to accommodate these additional options. You're still looking at a small number of probes (probably ~5 before the peak overlap becomes too significant), but it's not necessarily "1".

Honestly, though, I'd flip the protocol from how it's laid out in the press release since false negatives could be deadly if you're looking at resistance mutations. Put in three non-WT versions, assay lights up if it's mutant. If you don't care about which mutation, they can share the same fluorophore. Or three non-WT and one WT with a different fluorophore so you always get a positive if the assay went correctly and a negative if there's an unexpected mutation in a different region of the sequence.

Oh its been done. In fact, ordering custom DNA sequences is pretty cheap.

No way in hell anyone who hasn't had massive experience with PCR is going to get results from a DIY PCR...PCR protocols, although simple, are incredibly touchy and take a lot of time to get consistent results from.

I have to disagree with you here, at least for checking a specific, limited set of loci. IAAMB (molecular biologist) but I don't have "massive" experience with PCR and yet I've never had trouble getting it to work by following standard protocols using quality reagents (e.g. from NEB) and primers (from IDT). As long as the DIY guide included directions to use IDT's software to assist them in choosing primers and to determine the annealing temperature to use during the PCR cycle, I don't see why your typical DIYer with access to some old lab equipment wouldn't be able to get it to work as long as the DNA prep was good.

I would imagine a limiting factor to this approach would be the cost of the necessary equipment, with thermocyclers running in the thousands of dollars.

Your being paranoid. It is easy to add 1 and 1 to get 2. It is not currently possible to order the entire genome of Influenzavirus, strain H1N1, and create an epidemic. You don't really know what your talking about. Just for giggles say you could mastermind such an endevour and order your virus "to go". You could order a giant 200-base oligo from IDT and it would cost you about $5,435.20(US) and it would come in about 68 chucks that you would then have to reconstruct into its original multipartite genome. This would not be easy. This would require a very large lab with people and resources. Also, as with many other viruses, many of the base sequences are estimates and, additionally, may not represent the most virulent genome from the quasispecies population. I don't think the world needs to worry about pimple-faced teenagers ravaging the world with influenza. I think the human species should be more concerned (especially in the "developed nations") with pimple-faced teenagers doing nothing.

Software companies are not the only companies which write software. I defy anyone to show me a company with over 50 employees which doesn't use some kind of home-brewed software somewhere in its operations (and, yes, I mean other than HTML content). This is especially the case in scientific research, where if the budget's tight and a needed tool is either nonexistent or too expensive, the answer is "Write your own." I work for the bioinformatics department of a biotech firm, where I am paid to write free software.

Up until recently, that's been free as in beer; we have a suite of DNA development apps that we provide as web services, so our clients are doing their research with our cycles instead of shelling out $4000 a seat for a closed-source solution. Lately, however, I've been working on a tool (for site-directed mutagenesis, if anyone really cares) which will be both integrated into the web toolkit and released as a stand-alone GPLed app. The legal department's behind it. I am stoked beyond comprehension.

But does this work? Oh hell yeah, if you go by the bottom line and by the number of calls my boss gets every week from bioinfo startups trying to convince him to provide 45-day free-trial downloads of their software on our site. (Use our bandwidth to promote your closed-source code? I don't think so, bitch.) Obviously, people could visit the site (the tool suite doesn't require registration or anything like that), design a primer, then order it from one of our competitors, and I'm sure some people do; but why bother when there's a convenient, unobtrusive "Order now" button just below your results? I'm sure we could sell our software, but in the long run, the customer goodwill we build up (along with the increased orders) by providing this for free is more important to the CEO than whatever short-term quick bucks we could squeeze out by hawking SciTools. In the end, providing free software is the game-winning solution.

I'm sure this can't be the only example of a situation where this tactic works, though I haven't given a lot of thought to where else it would be appropriate. Hmm, maybe I should post this as an Ask Slashdot.

Needless to say, this knowledge would be incredibly valuable. And, yes, dangerous in the wrong hands -- but the genes which allow human infection in bird flu may not be, and in fact are probably not, the same genes which allow human infection in other viruses.