The Devil is in the Details-- and That's What Makes it Fun

In my last post, I mentioned how little I actually knew about bioengineering and how much I wanted to learn more. After another two weeks of 20.020, I am really excited about how my knowledge has progressed. I feel like I'm learning a lot, and the more I learn, the more enthusiastic I become about building upon that knowledge. It's really awesome to see how an intricate physical science can unite so beautifully with an engineering discipline in order to solve problems.

One thing that continues to amaze me is how the ideas behind our in-class experiments are even devised in the first place. It's crazy to think that someone woke up one morning and thought, "I want to take a picture with bacteria" and managed to develop a system to do just that. With my experience in engineering, I know that it must have took much longer and many more failures than just that in real life. These failures are often much more complex than the goopy mess of an electrophoresis system I managed to create, but you live and you learn (I think we didn't microwave it for long enough! It's something I want to try again on my own to see if I can get it right.).

On the subject of failures, I am realizing as class progresses that bioengineering is sort of unique in that biological systems are prone to a certain degree of unpredictability. As Ellen said when she skyped in, "the devil is in the details." A project may look great on paper, but the intricacies of biology mean that the systems are often much harder to execute than they are to plan. Unlike mechanical engineering where a mistake is usually easily identifiable as a malfunctioning part or piece of code, a failed biological system could be the result of any number of problems, some we may not even be familiar with yet. It poses a very interesting and unique challenge to the scientific mind, and it is a challenge that draws me to bioengineering as a field because of its complexity. As we progress into our own project designs over the next few weeks, I can't wait to delve further into the intricacies of biological design in order to see what the problem-solving approach looks like to a bioengineer.