It's not a joke. It's synthetic biology, an emerging field that now offers biologists the ease of ordering "consumer-off-the-shelf" DNA sequences known to perform specific functions. MIT's Drew Endy is leading a program to label and standardize genetic material analogous to the way hardware stores offer standardized nuts and bolts. Instead of slaving for months to build GCTA GTCG ATCG TAGC TTGC TATG GCT [...] GCTA GTC GAT CGT AGC TTT CGAT CGTA GCTT GCTATG, biologists can just order "Part I6060." Consumers wouldn't actually buy these parts, but labs can now search an online catalogue of BioBricks and choose what they need for an experiment. The sequences are synthesized directly into the familiar sugar-phosphate backbones linked by purines and pyramidines--DNA--and grafted usually into an e-coli bacterium.

Last week, a team of Slovenian undergrads won MIT's iGEM competition by reconfiguring a mammalian cell (no mention of whose) using BioBricks. The Slovenes' bug is programmed to sense and and shut-down the runaway immune system reaction that leads to sepsis. Endy and other leading figures in synthetic biology hope the standardization will facilitate the discovery or invention of world-altering medicines and tools.

For their labor, the Slovenian team won a large aluminum Lego brick. The MIT home team, named "Eau d'ecoli," constructed a bacterium that smells like mint while growing and like banana when it has matured. The perfumery won't prevent sepsis, but might help e-coli score on a Saturday night... Damn! They're self-replicating. No need. Mammalian cells, part of the biological domain Eukarya, are larger and more complicated than bacteria, largely because they acquired and annexed entire bacterial genomes during evolution.

Says Endy: It's "completely remarkable that 40 months ago, none of this was happening anywhere."