I'm not really sure why this is controversial and I'm not sure why it is routinely "denied" by biologists. It is not much of a stretch to go from saying that DNA is a blueprint for an organism's form, function and reproduction, to saying it is an algorithm encompassing all that and doing a whole lot more, which is what the whole point of "decoding" it is all about.
I think the issues around higher level functions, self modifying code, debugging, the creative process of new programs, etc. is deniable to the extent that these things are only recognisable from the point of view of the programmer being separate from the program, rather than one part of the software as they appear to be in DNA of living things. Just the fact that it "sounds" like it implies outside intelligence, is enough to make any naturalist worth their salt to deny any such analogy with a Turing machine, regardless of the evidence.
