What sci-fi writer would not love to pitch a story with something like the opening paragraph from this NYT’s piece:

In the menagerie of Craig Venter’s imagination, tiny bugs will save the world. They will be custom bugs, designer bugs — bugs that only Venter can create. He will mix them up in his private laboratory from bits and pieces of DNA, and then he will release them into the air and the water, into smokestacks and oil spills, hospitals and factories and your house. Each of the bugs will have a mission.

Once again, reality stealing our fiction.