Great article, questionable title though...
While I applaud the author for a very nice explanation for the layman, I think the term "(de)coding" is too much abused today and used where it does not really belong.
This is very similar case as in, for example, scientists using term neural "coding" - saying that something is (de)coded implies that it has been "coded" in the first place. Of course, decoding compressed audio or video signal results in (almost, sometimes) original audio or video signal, but this is precisely because the said signal has been coded in the first place, we know, because we did the coding.
Gene information, on the other hand... not really. Genes (or, better, clumps of molecules we call "genes") are inherent part of the living beings, these molecules do not "code" anything, not any more than, say, crankshaft "codes" anything in the internal combustion engine. These things are parts of the process and not just "code".
While sometimes it can be very useful to compare or abstract living processes using concepts from the information theory or computing, this can be dangerously misleading if taken too far. Biological processes are not computation. While these processes can, to some extent, be compared to or modelled with concepts from the information theory, they are much more than that.
Please do not get me wrong, I applaud the science for working on understanding the processes responsible for keeping matter alive, and I am quite sure that better understanding of the molecular machinery will lead to better medicine and quality of life for humans and animals, but this "decoding", and, let's not forget, "-omics" fashion (for some reason, it became very fashionable to stick "-omics" name to things recently, probably having something to do with better grants) can give false sense that we understand something more than we actually currently do.
It awfully reminds me of claims that we'll "crack" the problem of intelligence in late 50s. 60 years later, we are still discovering new dimensions of the problem. I fear this will also apply to the molecular processes underlying "bootstraping" (damn it, I did it too) the living organism.
/end rant :)