By Emma Brown

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. Then they heated the vials up and cooled them down 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,” said Dan Tarjan, a senior majoring in biology, as he returned to the lab one morning last week, croissant in hand.

Building microscopic critters via genetic tinkering was once the stuff of science fiction — and just a generation ago, it was confined to the world’s most sophisticated laboratories. 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.

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