You can start with your favorite language by downloading a library, there is bioPerl, bioPython, bioRuby and even bioPHP!
The libraries have all the routines to connect to public sources.<p>The National Center for Biotechnology Information <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/89889045?report=fasta&#38;log$=seqview" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/89889045?report=fasta&#3...</a> has an enormous database and is all open source. The link I quoted lists the genome  for a virus. I wrote a short program in JavaScript that did frequency analysis on the pairs. It took 30ms in Chrome. It is actually not all that difficult at a certain level of analysis.<p>In my mind the big question is, how can we understand how it works? It is like giving you a binary for windows to reverse engineer it. My own question is; does my DNA makes me? If my grandkids have it on a memory stick (it can actually fit), would they be able to 're-construct' me in some form of virtual reality?<p>A potential area for hackers to get involved in my opinion - is the potential of the Cloud. You can imagine say 10 million genomes stored out there at the not so distant future and distributed software analyzing it and indexing it and all the ethical and other problems that come from it.