Competitors strive to create new life-forms

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Creating an original organism required no bolt of lightning for a team of University of Virginia students. But it did take buckets of ice, vials of bacteria and a FedEx delivery.

Nestled in the package were bits of DNA, whipped up in California and ordered online. When they arrived at a lab crowded with flasks, pipettes and aging equipment held together with pieces of red tape, the students plunged vials of E. coli bacteria into the ice-filled buckets. They heated the vials up and cooled them again.

During that process, the tiny bacterial cells cracked open just enough to let the DNA inside, and a new life form was born: an army of tiny arsenic-absorbers, offering the possibility of cheaper, easier ways to clean up contaminated water.

"We're kind of making a new machine," Dan Tarjan, a senior majoring in biology, said last week.

Building microscopic critters via genetic tinkering was confined to the world's most sophisticated laboratories a generation ago. But with more powerful computers and cheaper equipment, it is within reach of students at high schools, community colleges and universities, hundreds of whom are competing this year to create the coolest new organism on the planet.

Interchangeable parts

The International Genetically Engineered Machine (IGEM) competition, which will be held Halloween weekend at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., is built on the premise that life can be broken down into a warehouse of off-the-shelf, interchangeable parts and reassembled into creatures that have never existed.

U-Va.'s invention, dubbed an arsenic sponge by its creators, will vie for the grand prize — an oversize silver Lego block — with offerings from 102 other teams, including a bacteria-powered battery (City College of San Francisco) and an anti-allergy drug made with a gene found in tick saliva and bacteria that live in human noses (Brown University).

Adherents call this kind of science synthetic biology. Critics call it scary.

At the heart of the competition is MIT's Registry of Standard Biological Parts, founded in 2003 as a physical repository and online catalog of DNA pieces whose function and behavior have been defined. Called BioBricks, these are the building blocks students use, Lego-like, to build new organisms.

Students are constantly designing new BioBricks, such as the DNA that arrived at U-Va.'s lab last month, a tweaked version of a gene that occurs naturally in plants. Creating them is one of the criteria by which the teams are judged. Last year, teams added 1,300 parts, bringing the number of BioBricks to about 3,350.

In 2006, students from Edinburgh, Scotland, built a strain of bacteria that villagers in Bangladesh could use to test the potability of water. In the presence of arsenic, which poisons an estimated one-quarter of wells there, the bacteria turned red. Last year, a team from Slovenia built a vaccine for Helicobacter pylori, ulcer-causing bacteria that infect half the world's population.

Synthetic biology

Synthetic biology is unnerving to those who doubt scientists can keep their inventions from escaping their labs and wreaking havoc and who wonder whether regulators can keep the field's powerful potential out of the hands of terrorists.

"IGEM is effectively an attempt to build a work force for ... a very disruptive industry," said Jim Thomas, a researcher with the Ottawa-based ETC Group, a nonprofit group that opposes genetic engineering in agriculture.

"It's sold as, 'it's light, it's fun, it's hip, it's green.' It's not being sold as risky, as untested. One of the big concerns is that kids are being taught that DNA is a computer code, and you can program biological organisms the same way you can program a computer. I think that's going to prove to be a bad analogy."

Randy Rettberg, director of the IGEM competition, said he understands people are concerned, but added that students are generally working with strains as harmless as flour and water. They're bound by their schools' lab-safety protocols and, at the competition, are judged partly by how they address risks.

There are also moral questions about messing with nature on such a profound level.

"This question of, these things are made by God, and therefore how should we be dealing with those things because they were made by God — that's just beyond my job description," Rettberg said.