So this is why curing cancer is hard...

The idea that we were going to detect and treat cancer sounded difficult. Obviously no one has really "cured" cancer yet. So we should have expected that it would be a difficult task to take on.  First we looked as what makes tumors different from other cells in the body. We filled multiple whiteboards with different parameters that all had one thing in common: they work sometimes, but other times they create false positives or negatives.  Therefore, we had to narrow what type of cancer we were going to examine. We decided to look as GI cancer because we could report a positive result the same way it was reported in the blue baby project.
Then there were just more papers. I actually found looking for markers of GI cancer to be kind of enjoyable this time. Enjoyable is probably the wrong word there, but I think looking through papers is becoming easier.  I also liked how we were all working together and communicating about what markers we were coming across. Sometimes when we work in small groups in iGEM, we were all working on different aspects of the project and it was difficult to bounce ideas off of each other.  Regardless, through this process we have found something that occurs in many GI cancer cells and we now have a system designed that can detect it.
Designing circuits is also becoming more enjoyable. This is probably because I have a better idea of what we are doing.  Now that I have a general idea about the basics, the problem solving is really fun.   Now if I do major in 20 and ever read this blog post again, I will probably be shaking my head at that last sentence because I just have no idea how much I do not know right now. I suppose that it what is exciting though. Doing really anything with cancer is difficult and there is so much I do not know about synthetic biology and there is so much that is not known in general, but there is just that idea of potential cures and treatments and that is what makes it worth it.  On IB English exams at my high school, there were different writing prompts to choose from and my teacher always told us never to choose the prompt you look at and think "oh I can write everything about that quickly and in one paragraph".  Maybe innovation in general is based on the foundation of never choosing that type of "prompt", whether is be in science, english, math, or really any field.