Creativity...?

How do people like Professor Belcher come up with original ideas that actually work? Between her ideas of making batteries using phage and modifying scanning electron microscopes, there aren't very many ideas left for the rest of us. It's absurdly difficult to come up with an original idea-- every idea I could dream up, with my very limited undergraduate education, seems to be something studied and dissected by a graduate student, post-doc, or professor somewhere in the world. The only real way forward, for my group at least, was to read some new scientific articles, take notes on the discussion section, and Google every question that came into our head regarding suggested experiments. My team decided to look into the possibility of using Zika virus, something my team knew almost nothing about, as a potential treatment for glioblastoma multiforme, a cancer that my team knew almost nothing about. During various class discussions, my team heard various other groups discuss problems they were interested in studying and fixing, namely with CRISPR, a mechanism we had studied extensively in class. When discussing our ideas, my team repeatedly ran into issues with our lack of background knowledge and lack of knowledge regarding how to push our project forward. I briefly reconsidered our project: should we have gone with a project using CRISPR, where we would have been able to give the presentation without doing too much additional background research, or should we continue with our current strange but somewhat innovative project of using Zika virus to cure brain cancer? I guess we'll find out tomorrow.