Electricity from Viruses - Science Fiction? No - Science FACT

I saw this in Time a month ago - and decided to go straight to the source: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Engineering viruses: using biology to assemble materials, devices.

Ok - im not gonna copy and paste the article, but here a quick rundown:

Angela Belcher, a proffersor at MIT, has created a small, rechargeable battery - made from Viruses.

Basically, inspired by Abalone shells - which are strengthened by the shells surface proteins binding to materials in sea water, like iron and calcium - Belchers team created viruses that bind copper, and then line up into tiny little rows, and also grow cobalt oxide so that when they add lithium to the mix- you are basically getting a normal battery, working a hell of a lot more efficiently, and at the nano-level - and the resultant battery looks like a small, clear credit card.

Im no engineer, and I havent done any physics/chemistry (or even maths) for a good 7 years - so my understanding of the electronic part of this is probably way off... but the biology is way cool. With enough messing of their DNA, you could create viruses that can do pretty much anything chemically - such as use up all of our excess CO2, or create other materials that could be useful.