Coming up with a novel idea is difficult but also really exciting.

After Mod 2, I was very excited for Mod 3. Woah virus battery that can light LED! Woah propose a novel research idea of your own! My teammate and I read some papers, but still quite procrastinate on choosing the idea for the project. Until the day before the elevator pitch, we decided that well, we couldn't procrastinate anymore, so we sat down and tried to think of a really novel idea. And we spent several hours in a seemingly infinite loop.
First, we were so excited when we thought of an idea that seemed so original. Second, we used Google Scholar to confirm that it was a novel idea, only to discover that someone already did it like 5 years ago. Third, we repeated step 1. People seemed to already proposed everything possible with CRISPR, and every disease seemed to have a proposed cure. We repeated this loop lots of time. And then an idea came to my mind.
CRISPR can up-regulate and down-regulate a gene seperately, but can it up-regulate and down-regulate a gene alternatively, and create an infinite loop or oscillation? And finally, we were happy to find out that no one have tried to use CRISPR to oscillate gene, and this was indeed a novel idea.
 After that, we spent lots of time reading papers to find out how to create an oscillating gene circuit. It was also excited to read about how oscillating signal could encode and integrated complicated signal from environment and inside the cell.
I think Mod 3 was a really exciting and educational experience that made us more up to date with exciting biotech papers and learned to do litareture research so that we could learn by ourselves more effectively.