Hell's Bugs.(chlorinated solvent consuming bacteria)

Tim McHale doesn't have to go far from his office to do his fieldwork. "All I need to do is reach out my window and scoop up a sample," he says. Dozens of C-5 cargo jets sit on the airstrip of Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, about 300 feet away. For years a pipeline that brought them fuel leached into the surrounding soil. Now a zone of pollution a quarter mile in all directions holds about 500,000 gallons of methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE), a highly soluble gasoline additive.

Solvents like MTBE are among the most hazardous of pollutants, and the toughest to remove from the environment. And they are almost everywhere: trace amounts can be found in most drinking water. After decades of experimentation and false promises, scientists now think they've finally discovered bacteria tough enough to eat these chemicals and turn them into harmless byproducts. "People looked for a long time to find organisms that would efficiently degrade these chemicals," says Dr. Frank Loffler, a microbiologist at Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "Now they actually have found them."

The first big breakthrough came a decade ago, when Perry McCarty of Stanford University and other scientists found two new strains of bacteria that seem to thrive on chlorinated solvents--the world's most common industrial pollutant, used in glue, paint, aerosol ...