When Meagan Lizarazo ’04 was a first-year at Wellesley, she used marshmallows and Twizzlers to construct “DNA” in her introductory biology class. Little did she know that the simple exercise foreshadowed a 15-year career at iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine), a synthetic biology nonprofit that, through its large international competition, has shaped the field of synthetic biology.

Synthetic biology is a tricky term to define. “You ask 10 different people what their definition is, and you’ll get 10 different answers,” Meagan says. For her, however, “it really comes down to using the power of biology to solve problems that we have in the world—and so that boils down to biology as technology.” A key element of synthetic biology? Building: “Synthetic biology is more like engineering, where the goal is to build something.”

那么Meagan如何在IGEM落地？这一切都开始了，而在午餐休息的时候在毕业后波士顿乔斯林糖尿病中心的实验室技术，她撞到了同样的教授，他在Wellesley教授了她的介绍生物学阶级，并且自从搬到麻省理工学院以来。稍后的电话和几次采访，Lizarazo加入了一个在麻省理工学院的实验室，正在开发一种合成生物学研究系统。

The system is based on standard biological parts—standardized chunks of DNA that encode for particular functions. “The idea was you should be able to just plug and play pieces of DNA, sort of like Legos—you can build anything with Legos because they all fit together,” she explains. “And then the idea was, let’s create a catalog of all of these biological parts, so that if you want a piece of DNA that does a particular thing, all you have to do is flip through a catalog of parts and find it.”

在2003年完成标准生物零部件的注册表后，该实验室邀请了一些麻省理工学院大学生团队使用拆卸套件作为冬季会话课程设计自己的生物系统。在几年之内，该课程已经发展成为了IGEM比赛，来自世界各地的团队，2012年，IGEM基金会被创建。在过去的一年里，300多支球队竞争，而Meagan估计，超过35,000人参加了迄今为止的IGEM比赛，包括大多数工作的合成生物学家。

多年来，IGEM团队拥有工程的生物系统，可以解决大量问题，包括在孟加拉国的井中检测砷，在墨西哥的牛油果垃圾处理，以及在印度尼西亚的假冒蜂蜜进行测试。经常，团队使用E. colias the basis of their projects, engineering the bacteria to perform a specific function. Some of the projects have become biotech startups, such as Ginkgo Bioworks in Cambridge, Mass.

Meagan joined iGEM as a lab tech, eventually transitioning into an operations role where she was responsible for keeping the competition running smoothly. Now, as executive vice president and chief operating officer, she is taking on a new challenge: increasing iGEM’s visibility. She is also developing “After iGEM,” a network that connects the students who have competed. And, because around 80 percent of iGEM participants live outside the U.S., she is helping iGEM expand internationally, with its first overseas office planned for Europe.

至于Meagan发现最引人注目的合成生物学，答案很简单：“它只是有很多潜力。It’s like we’re in the early days of the internet, and we know that it’s going to have a huge impact on the world—we don’t know exactly how, and we don’t know exactly what, but there’s just so much potential, and you can feel it.”