10 Ways Genetically Engineered Microbes Could Help Humanity

After giving us lifetimes of plagues, colds, and athlete’s foot, microbes are being recruited and transformed to fight disease—and help us in other ways, too. The technology emerging from the Human Genome Project has made sequencing DNA one-fiftieth the cost of a decade ago and given geneticists a wealth of information, so that a standard laboratory organism can be altered with relative ease. With some tweaks to their genetic code, microbes can be turned into tiny workhorses: