What is bioengineering, really?

I feel like every semester I’ve been here, my understanding of ‘Biological Engineering’ as a discipline has evolved. I keep learning more about all the different applications course 20 can touch on and what does and doesn’t capture my attention. This is great news for a person who doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, and I hope I continue learning more about the field and about my interests throughout my years here and beyond. Each semester, the fog clears a little bit more.

I have been vacillating on majors for quite a while. Until last semester, I wasn’t sure if I should stay loyal to course 20 or switch to course 2 or 3 (or even course 6!). Unlike the people who discover their passion in high school and can’t wait to go to college to study it further, all I knew throughout high school was that I vaguely enjoyed biology… and chemistry… and the little bit of html/JavaScript that Codecademy taught me. Engineering sounded cool, but back then I thought of “engineering” as a single field, unsure as to what it actually entailed. It was only as I was working on my MIT application, specifically the question on what major I was interested in, that I began exploring the different fields of engineering. I remember choosing material science, because I was interested in alternative energy sources and material science seemed like a good way to delve into that.

But then I did the course 20 FPOP, and that opened up my eyes a little more. I had associated biological engineering with working with cells, mice, organs, genes/DNA, and drug development - all of which sounded vaguely interesting, but I wasn’t sure they were for me. In the FPOP, we did a tour of biotech companies in the vicinity, which confirmed the large application of BE in the pharmaceutical industry, but were also introduced to Ginkgo Bioworks, which designs custom microbes to develop different scents. Even though I’m not particularly interested in this particular application, it introduced me to the fact that biology is such a vast field and it can be used for things outside of medicine.

This concept intrigued me a lot and I started searching for bioengineering labs that weren’t particularly therapeutic-related. In this way, I stumbled on the Belcher lab – I mean, who wouldn’t be fascinated by the idea of viruses being used as templates for batteries? It was such a new idea that I had never heard of, so I spent a semester helping my grad student work on and test cathodes made of nanofoams from cross-linked batteries. Working on this project, it was interested to see how the specific angle that my grad student was taking was more on the materials science-y side, as I think other lab members would make/engineer the phage solutions and we would make them into cathodes, change different variables, and test.

It was great to relive that experience through mod 3. I really appreciated this class and the three modules we did. The first two modules were related to topics that I subconsciously associate bioengineering with – DNA engineering, screening, protein expression, genetic engineering, tissue culture, cell survival assays, PCR, and all that fun stuff. Most of the techniques we learned were stuff I hadn’t done before, so it was a great introduction. And module 3 was exciting, especially as it made me wonder – if m13 can be engineered to make a cathode, what else can it be manipulated to make? It seems like it could be used for many other applications as well, and it was cool to see that one of the groups thought similarly and proposed to engineer it into a water filter.

tl;dr: bioengineering is cool!