Pitting Bugs Against Pollution

A New York community living over a toxic plume of polluted groundwater may look to pollution-eating microbes in an effort to get their neighborhood cleaned up. Such methods are at the frontiers of pollution cleanup technology. Scientists have studied ways to harness organism's natural abilities - or to augment them through gene splicing - and then set them loose on the world's polluted hot spots. At three years and more than $11 million, the New York cleanup proposal doesn't sound cheap and easy. But compared to traditional methods of cleaning groundwater - which can cost several times as much and stretch on indefinitely - some residents say it sounds pretty good.