I caught Ira Flatow’s show Science Friday on the radio last week (mp3) in which he discussed the iGEM contest:

The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM) is the premiere undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition. Student teams are given a kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Working at their own schools over the summer, they use these parts and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells.

I think there is huge potential for biological machines, something Craig Venter has been talking about for a while, now.