The lab team kept toiling away. Bassler got married in 2002. Students graduated; more came to take their places.

Then, in September 2002, the MacArthur Foundation called, and she got the genius label. "It was totally over the top," Bassler says, "such a validation that somewhere out there, scientists think we're doing great stuff." Bouquets of flowers arrived. The phone started ringing.

"You're in a lab with no exposure to the popular press, and suddenly, people want to interview you," says Mike Federle, a postdoc who arrived just before the world discovered that Bassler is a genius. "You pick up the phone in the lab, and it's some reporter, and they start asking questions."

Now, the lab's cookie jar overflows. The lab is packed with equipment, including a petri-picking robot and an afluorescence cell sorter, each worth around a half-million dollars and courtesy of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Eighteen people work there now, growing bacteria, creating mutants, testing hypotheses, writing papers, and smelling fish poop.

ONE OF THE THINGS the Bassler Lab is working on is finding a way to moderate a bacterium's virulence. Here's a for instance that uses E. coli O157:H7, a germ that's caused a handful of fierce outbreaks in recent years: When E. coli finds its way into a human body, it doesn't start attacking immediately. It waits until it has a quorum, and then, pow! Virulence factors turn on, and the human gets really sick. In the case of E. coli, the bacteria start to produce a toxin that wreaks havoc. The idea is to trick the E. coli into thinking that only a few other E. coli are around. Then no virulence factors turn on, so there's no toxin, no grave illness.