But by early fall the core group that would travel to M.I.T. established itself. In addition to Sandate, there was the team’s founder, Leeza Sergeeva, a deadpan 19-year-old from Moscow; Angela Brock, 34, with a bleached, punk haircut, who came back to school to study electrical engineering after dropping out 10 years ago; and Bertram Lee, 47, a high-spirited man who wore his pants high on the waist and short at the ankles. Lee spent a decade designing databases in the financial sector, then took up science somewhat spontaneously after his parents passed away. Finally there was Bowen Hunter, a plucky 27-year-old certified massage therapist who went to a Southern Baptist high school in Texas that taught creationism instead of evolution and now wanted to get a master’s and teach in City College’s biotech track.

From a technical standpoint, the design of the team’s battery was relatively straightforward compared with other iGEM projects, but it turned out to be ambitious in its own way. Two glass containers, the size of cider jugs, would be connected by a glass tube. Each contained a different species of bacteria, living in a liquid medium. The bacteria on the right side, R. Palustris, are photosynthetic, converting sunlight into sugar, which they need to survive. The other bacteria also subsist on sugar but can’t generate their own; they use sugar as energy to create a small electric charge. Both types of bacteria exist, as is, in nature; the team spent a lot of time researching online for the best-suited species and ones they could easily obtain. VandePol fetched a particularly good strain of R. Palustris from a lab at M.I.T. when he flew there for an iGEM teachers’ training last spring, and the team bought the other bacteria, first discovered at the bottom of a bay in Virginia, for $240 through the mail.

The idea was to build a bacteria-based battery that could be powered entirely by the sun. To do that, the team would redesign the photosynthetic R. Palustris so that it released some of the sugar it made and sent it through the tube to fuel the electricity generation of the bacteria on the other side. The students would need to re-engineer R. Palustris to give up its food — something that in nature would be totally nonsensical. They had a long list of tasks, but this was the pivotal one: give R. Palustris a leak.

The story of iGEM and, to some degree, the vision of synthetic biology that it champions, begins not with biologists but with engineers. From the beginning, the approach was rooted less in the biologist’s methods of patient observation than in the engineer’s childlike love of building cool stuff and hyperrational expectations about the way things ought to work.

Drew Endy came to M.I.T. as a bioengineering fellow in 2002 at the age of 32. He now teaches at Stanford and is probably the field’s most voluble and charismatic spokesman. “I sort of Facebook-stalk him,” I overheard a student say at the jamboree. (Last month, the National Science Foundation financed the creation of a full-scale BioBrick part factory in the Bay Area, called the Biofab; Endy is a founding director.) At M.I.T., Endy found a group of colleagues — like him, all originally engineers by training — who were disappointed with how unmethodical a field that was termed “genetic engineering” appeared to still be: its major successes were more like imaginative, one-off works of art than systematic engineering projects. As Endy told me, “I grew up in a world where you can go into a hardware store and buy nuts and bolts, put them together and they work.” Just as you tell a computer to add 2 and 2 and know you’ll get 4, Endy said, you should be able to give a cell simple commands and have it reliably execute them — and explaining this, he still managed to sound honestly flummoxed that something so absolutely logical wasn’t actually true; his approach to the living world is astonishingly Spock-like. “Biology is the most interesting and powerful technology platform anyone’s ever seen,” he said. “It’s already taken over the world with reproducing machines. You can kind of imagine that you should be able to program it with DNA.”

Arguably this has been an implicit dream of genetic engineering all along. But starting in the mid-’90s, synthetic biologists concluded that we had amassed enough knowledge about how genomes work and developed enough tools for manipulating them that it was time to actively pursue it. In 2003, Endy formed a partnership with three other like-minded engineers at M.I.T., Gerald Sussman, Randy Rettberg and Tom Knight. Rettberg, who now directs iGEM, had absolutely no background in biology until, after retiring as a chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems in 2001, he started reading textbooks and hanging around Knight’s lab; the two friends worked early in their careers on designing computers. Knight had already developed the concept of BioBrick parts and a method for connecting them.

The four men decided that rather than spend decades figuring out how to turn life into the predictable machinery they wanted it to be and then teaching that to their students, they would enlist the students to help. They taught a monthlong course challenging teams of students to design E. coli that “blinked” — that is, generated fluorescent light at regular intervals. That first experimental class rapidly evolved, by 2006, into an iGEM Jamboree involving 35 schools. And from there, Endy told me, “this thing goes international fast.”