Yesterday, the Broad Institute Foundry, a synthetic biology laboratory at MIT, announced its new contract with DARPA. The lab will receive $32 million for engineering cells to find better treatments for disease, make new biofuels, or create fabrics woven with life.

"Living cells are the ultimate engineering substrate. They are the most difficult thing out there to be able to control," says Christopher Voigt, a professor of biomedical engineering and one of the lab's co-founders, in a video. "Imagine being able to engineer a living cell that can navigate the human body, identify disease, and correct that disease. That requires that the cell be able to sense where they are in the body, be able to detect it, and deliver a therapeutic. And that's something that biology, we know it can do. But we don't know how to harness that as part of a medicine."