Computer science theory uses Turing machines represented as strings in order to make decisions about membership of languages. The universal Turing machine is a machine that give a representation of another machine and a string will simulate it and tell you whether or not the machine will halt on that string.

What if we were to apply this idea to DNA. DNA is a language that represents a machine; an organism. Maybe we could treat a single celled organism as machine, take its DNA and simulate its behaviour. Ultimately we could take arbitry DNA and investigate its resulting organism.

Problems:
The protein formed by an arbitry string of DNA is still unresolved.

The metabolic pathways of all but the simplest organisms are not exhaustivly understood.