You have to consider the genesis of such a development. Human DNA will not be the first to be compilable (save “disassemblable”), so there will be many years of experience with less complex organisms before people would start to alter human cells, embryos or even full-grown organisms.
A technology like that will have a lot of consequences, many of which will further stress traditional ethics. I will not try to completely cover the question in my answer, instead it shall only deal with one aspect that is usually overlooked: genetic art.
When computers were new, some artist saw their potential in developing new art forms and raising the limits on existing ones, e.g. interactive installations, generating fractals or helping in the construction of complex artworks. Computer code itself has less often been considered art and neither has microchip design, although there are counter-examples.
Similar things will happen with and to genetic code. There will be artificial RNA or DNA molecules, other proteins – or polymeres, but that’s off-topic – and viruses that just look or behave “artful”, and there will be proper lifeforms from bacteria to plants and animals that will either be considered artworks by themselves, e.g. chimaeras or fairy-tale “re-creatures”, or are designed to perform art, e.g. swarms aligning in pretty patterns. There probably will be the occasional mad artist – which seems more frequent than the mad scientist – who thinks their genetically created disease will count as art, too.
Later on, people will alter their bodies to become artworks like they already do with tattoos, piercings, scars and other permanent body-modification, but also with hairstyles, makeup, body-paint, clothing etc. This will probably be better accepted morally than altering someone else’s genetic code, including one’s offspring.
Genetic art will be covered by copyright, not patents, by the way.
Disclosure: I once planned to write an SF story that dealt with a pioneer of genetic art who financed their expensive facilities that had to be located outside the reach of traditional-moral jurisdictions by also making and selling the most exotic (and obedient and satisfied) prostitutes human clients had ever, well, seen. Their justification would have been that it was more ethical and less dangerous to breed sex slaves than super-soldiers. In the artist’s mind, their side-job creatures weren’t enslaved of course because they were just looking human, not thinking or feeling like one. One prerequisite of this plot was that genetic alteration was too complex, messy and non-determininistic for scientists or engineers, so only artists could actually do it.
– Feel free to adopt that idea or part of it. I understand it may sound like the setup for cheap SF porn, though.
