Time (PH)lies (A)lways - (GE)


Wow, I can't believe it’s already almost the end of the semester! It’s literally so crazy. Even though so much has happened, both within 109 and my life, I feel like I just sat down for the first day of classes two days ago. While I know time flies, it still baffles me every time it keeps on doing it.

Anyways, enough of my reflections. So what does “Biological Engineering” mean to me? It means engineering biology ideally to solve problems somewhere down the line. I say somewhere down the line because sometimes research does not have immediate applications, but I believe somewhere down the line, it will help someone, the society, the environment, something.  

But what does it mean exactly to engineer biology? Well, throughout this class, we’ve seen a variety of ways to do so—through use of the CometChip for damaging DNA, CRISPR to edit DNA, and phage to make a battery. In my UROP, I engineer biology through trying to grow human-cells in 3D cultures for tissue engineering. There’s a variety of different ways to engineer biology and I am very thankful for this class that it exposed me to a few different methods. I am also thankful that I finally understand CRISPR and it’s crazy to think that I, just an undergrad, have used CRISPR to engineer biology. CRISPR always seemed like this far off thing, but it’s not like that anymore.

Moreover, it was awesome to think about ways that we could engineer biology ourselves through our research proposals. And we were really trying to engineer biology as much as possible, since we combined a couple different systems (organoids and the microbiome). Really stacking up on that engineering of biology :)

Lastly, just thank y’all once again for making this class very enjoyable and for having taught us so much.

~Ayşe Güvenilir



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