According to Michael Crichton, it is true.

“In reality, the task of injecting a gene into an animal and making it work more closely resembled debugging a computer program that it did any biological process. You had to keep fixing the errors, making adjustments, eliminating unwanted effects, until you got the thing working. And then you had to wait for downstream effects to show up, sometimes years later.”

Crichton writes this in Next, his fictional book covering many of the topics and themes associated with genetic science. Pretty cool book, and a reminder of how capable a good author is of mixing fiction, with fact to push there view on specific subjects.

Anyway, I thought it very insightful of Crichton to pair genetic manipulation with software development. I think most of us, born into the information age, have very little understanding of how complex software engineering and computer science really are. The dynamic nature of computing platforms obviously don’t compare to any living thing’s genome, but it is pretty damn close.