A Pox on Your Genomic Knowledge

Why is the Guardian (disclosure: yeah, lots of my stuff there, too) running this story - on the front page - about one of its journos ordering and receiving some partial sequences of the smallpox virus? This story already broke in 2002, when someone did the same thing for the polio virus - except that they went even further, and produced a complete pathogen.

And frankly, it wasn't even much of story then. After all, once you know the digital genome of an organism, it's just a matter of engineering to produce the analogue instantiation (a mathematician writes).