This seems like a game-changing system, certainly for some tumours. I do wonder about the bacteria entering the wider environment though, but given it's a common bacteria I guess there's plenty of existing research in to that.

Makes me think of the studies showing how much of an effect your gut bacteria have on your health. Perhaps this could be harnessed to treat disease without the sledgehammers that are antibiotics.

Unfortunately I'm a software developer, not a biologist, so I know nothing about this. I'm sure smarter people are already working on it.

> At some point in the future, we will use programmable bacteria for treatment

Will bacteria be “programmable” in the same way that a computer is?

Hard to believe so maybe that’s not the right word for it.

If it will be then we will, in a way, be monkey patching natural selection’s code.

Testing would also be a pain!

> Will bacteria be “programmable” in the same way that a computer is?

> Hard to believe so maybe that’s not the right word for it.

They already are.

https://media.ccc.de/v/24c3-2329-en-change_me

That's a video from 2007 talking about how high school student can program bacteria. It's gotten a couple orders of magnitude easier and cheaper in the past decade since that talk.