The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) aims to develop the field of synthetic biology as an engineering discipline able to create novel biological organisms which solve "real-world problems" in a more efficient and cost-effective manner than current bioengineering practices. This efficiency comes from the standardization of biological parts which, like mechanical ones, can be used for multiple applications across a broad range of projects. This method is reliant on the development of four "thrusts": 1. biological parts that carry out basic cellular functioning such as transcription. 2. biological devices made up of many parts, which are able to perform "human-specified" functions. 3. biological chassis such as bacteria which house the functional parts and devices. 4. the final thrust, human practices, tries to understand how these synthetically designed biological entities will situate themselves in human contexts such as post-9/11 security (www.synberc.org). If properly executed, synthetic biology holds the promise to proliferate biotechnology as engineers have been able to rapidly produce mechanical and electronic tools. Although the method has been developed in theory, in practice synthetic biology remains in an inchoate state. To investigate the efficacy of their theoretical framework SynBERC has launched two "testbeds". One of these projects is designing bacteria that can identify and subsequently destroy tumor cells in the body, while the other is engineering bacteria to act as "chemical factory." This paper will investigate the tumor-killing bacteria testbed and show the great promise it holds as a new form of cancer therapy, the role that testbed projects such as this play in developing foundational technology in synthetic biology, but also the challenges the project will face in human and scientific contexts.