Saying Goodbye to 109

In the scheme of all the things we did in 109, the research proposal was by far the most intimidating. All the other project were challenging, don’t get me wrong, but the research proposal put all the power in our lab group. We would have to synthesize our own project, figure out a methods, and evaluate all the other factors that go into a research proposal.

~when you realize the research proposal due date is sneaking up~

But when each of us brought in our ideas for a research proposal, it was kind of cool hearing my lab mates and I talk about what we each were interested in and the totally different ideas each of us had for research ideas. Picking an idea was kind of hectic, but once we picked ours, everything just kind of fell into place.

~the hecticness of picking a topic (I’m the dog in the middle)~

Leaving 109, I definitely feel like an engineer. 109 opened the door to all the things a BE student can do: whether that be high throughput protein screening, tissue culturing, biomaterial work, or even writing a 14 page research article.

~me leaving 109~

Sam Leff (posted by Leslie)

Thank you 20.109!

Choosing a topic for our research proposal was by far the hardest part. Working on a team means that just because you've decided you have a fantastic world changing idea doesn't mean your partner will be even remotely interested. This can be a little heartbreaking. The first sign that things were going to be difficult was when Neslly and I discussed our topics and found that I was very interested in tissue engineering and she was very interested in environmental topics. Unfortunately these are two topics that do not combine easily. It took a lot of thinking but we finally came up with an idea that we are both interested in. Once we started reading research articles I got very very excited about the idea and am now considering contacting a HST professor who is working on bioprinting artificial organs!

Overall, 20.109 has really made me feel prepared to not only write about research I do but also to come up with new, well thought-out ideas and better understand what is reasonable and how to go about it. I think the research proposal was a great way to end the class as it really showed me how much I have learned this semester and made me very excited to continue down the Course 20 path!

Thank you to everyone who has made this class awesome!

No Tea, No Shade… Okay, maybe just a bit

Is it over? Is it really done?

Whelp, I guess 20.109 is finished.

Let’s discuss.

I want to first talk about Module 3.

No tea, no shade. I really enjoyed this module, more than I thought I would. I thought that lectures from Angela Belcher were very interesting. The lab ‘activities’ were equally interesting. I also surprisingly enjoyed the Research Proposal assignment. I generally hate greatly dislike any type of presentation, but this was actually interesting. Researching water purification strategies was interesting, and I was quite comfortable speaking about my slides. I was even interested in learning about all the other groups’ proposals. I had a great time despite feeling bogged down with Spring allergies.

Now to talk about the whole of 20.109.

What should I say? Or rather, what am I allowed to say? Joking… Or am I?

(I know I said I wouldn’t throw shade, but I can’t help it. I’ll try to stop now.)

Okay, let me start off by saying I was the most unprepared individual to enter this class. I really had no idea what I was getting into. I am a Course 20 major, so the only reason I chose to take this class was because it is a requirement. And then, when Noreen introduced the class in Lecture 1… Nope. I distinctly remember trying to “Nope” right out of that classroom. I remember calling my mom and telling her how much I was going to hate this class.

It’s hard to find the nice words about what I felt when 20.109 started. And that’s the true tea.

Sue me.

But after struggling throughout this whole semester (i.e. embarrassingly not being able to answer over half of the quiz questions, hardly ever getting a perfect score on my homework assignments, trudging through some labs that I’ll mention later, etc.), I think I can say that this wasn’t so bad. Now, I’m not going to say that this experience slayed my existence, but I do believe that it was fun. Maybe it’s some sort of Stockholm Syndrome, but this was most definitely not the worst experience of my life—that spot is reserved for *shudder* 20.110.

I learned a ton. I struggled a lot. Blood, sweat, and tears were shed. Sleep was lost. But generally, it was cool.

Let’s get into some specifics.

I’m not trying to be rude, but I was…ahem…quite over the BE Communication Lab ‘lectures’. I greatly appreciate the work that they do. I learned so much from them about how to structure the abstracts, introductions, and figures. It was very useful. But I’m not going to sit here and say that they were the highlights of 20.109. The BE Communication Lab was very informative and useful when they came to talk to us, but it was not the most fun of times. That’s all I’ll say about that. Moving on.

I’ve never been in a lab before, so I was very hesitant to be in this class. As the weeks when on, I learned to greatly appreciate this learning experience. I feel as though I have grown so much as a Biological Engineer. Leslie and Noreen (and Maxine during labs) were fantastic instructors and very helpful (thank you very much). The laboratory activities were very interesting and allowed me to better understand the applications of biology and chemistry. The lectures were extremely helpful in understanding the reasoning behind all the labs. It was cool to see many different paths in Biological Engineering. The three lecturers were all interesting in different ways, and I greatly appreciated everything.

There were some times during this semester where I was frustrated (to say the least). One thing that made me the most frustrated was writing Methods sections. It’s hard to explain what made me the most frustrated, but always seeing the same criticisms despite fixing the issues time and time again was quite discouraging. There were times I would get edits on my work where it would say to check the wiki, but was nowhere to be found on the wiki. I spent way too much time looking through the wiki to find “how to properly cite a source or manufacturer” that I eventually just gave up. I probably gave up more times than I should have, but that just how it went down. No regrets.

But now it’s over. Shade was thrown. Tea was spilled. And all I have left to say is, “thank you, and goodnight.”

It’s been real.

Developing a research idea and module 3

The module 3 research proposal was a novel experience that showed how much work goes into developing a research idea. Initially hoping to create a lysogenic, non-lytic bacteria from a known eukaryotic virus by conferring the mechanism of M13 exit, we eventually began to think that the more feasible approach would be to modify M13 bacteriophage to infect human cells. However, we quickly realized the difficulty and uncertainty of this process, as certain aspects of viral entry and exit involved mutagenesis and then hoping that these compounds bound. In addition, each step along the way we realized the small factors we needed to account for in our proposed procedure. We thought we could use human analogs to Tol Q, R, and A membrane proteins to initiate phage DNA penetration. It turned out there were no common precursors, and we were forced to turn towards using a cell receptor. Realizing we needed to transfer the DNA from the cytosol to the nucleus unlike in bacteria where the DNA is floating freely, we thought to use a nuclear localization sequence. Then realizing that a nuclear localization sequence is made of amino acids and not nucleotides, we thought to insert the DNA close to a positively charged protein that could carry it to the nucleus. Overall, this experience really showed me the difficulties of scientific research, as each step can have a number of issues that need to be fixed.

The module 3 process of building a battery from M13 was the part of the class that I was looking forward to. This topic seemed like a really cool idea and completely different from the majority of scientific work that I am familiar with. While I was a little disappointed that a large part of the lab sections were completed by Jifa rather than us, I thought the end result was pretty exciting. I actually created a practical object that could be used in real life and I could take back to my house.

20.109 has been one of the most fun classes during my time at MIT. I really enjoyed the hands-on application of biological engineering principals, getting to spend time in the lab with a close friend and also work on reporting our actual results. I learned a lot about scientific writing by having to write reports on each of the modules. In addition, I got to practice my oral presentation skills, an experience that has been lacking from my MIT education so far, even if it was a little stressful and got my blood pumping a little too much. I thought it was a lot of fun and a very different experience from other classes to actually design our own experiment and attempt to create a viable research proposal. Overall, this class taught me a lot about biological engineering and some of the necessary skills both inside and outside the lab while still being a blast.

A Much Needed Reminder of Why I’m Course 20

Before coming to MIT, my parents would always ask me at the end of every school year whether I had enjoyed my classes overall and how they compared to the previous year. My answer was almost always something along the lines of, “yeah they were good, probably a little better than last year.” When my parents asked me that earlier today, though, my answer was much more interesting.

The truth is, last semester was not great for me. There were parts of 7.03 that were interesting, but overall the class felt very slow and outdated. 6.009 wasn’t terribly difficult, but wasn’t terribly remarkable either. 6.042 was well taught, but the psets made me feel like I was a complete idiot. 

It also didn’t help that I was working 30+ hours every week in lab preparing for the iGEM competition. Don’t get me wrong, I loved working on that project - but 30 hours a week was just too much. My dad joked that I was working full time on the project and still managing to take classes on the side. And even when that ended halfway through the semester, I started 6.0002, which was also not one of my favorite classes here. At least I had Chinese class (and hockey, I guess) to keep me going until the end of finals.

This semester has been a pretty dramatic shift for the better. While my Chinese class has gotten a little less entertaining, my other classes have been incredible this semester. There are people who complain that Professor Yaffe talks too fast in 7.05, but I actually preferred it that way - even the most interesting classes are difficult for me to pay attention in if they’re too slow. And for all of the complaining I heard going into the class about the metabolism section, I actually like it a lot. Despite having almost no relevance to life science at all, 6.004 was one of my roommate's (a Course 6-3) favorite classes that he recommended I take this semester. Not only has it been a good contrast to my very life science heavy course load this semester, but the class in general is really cool.

20.109 has been an exceptional experience as a class for me in several ways. When I registered for the class, I was excited primarily because I finally felt like a real Course 20 now that I was taking 20.109, but I hadn’t really put much thought into what the actual content of the class would be like. On the first day of class, however, the professors teaching each of the modules gave us their brief descriptions of the modules. I walked out of that lecture incredibly excited for the semester. Since I’ve already discussed the first two modules in previous blog posts, I’ll talk mostly about module 3 for the rest of this post.

In the first lecture of module 3, what stood out to me most was that Professor Belcher makes no effort to hide the fact that she is extremely excited about the work she does, and her excitement is very contagious. This was the primary reason why I enjoyed going to her lectures so much. While a lot of the lab work for the module, particularly the first two days, was a little slow, I enjoyed very little more than telling people I was making a virus-based battery when they asked what I was doing in 20.109. 

As I discussed at length in my first blog post, the most exciting part of research for me is seeing physical evidence that my experiments have worked, so when we looked at our mineralized phage samples on the TEM, I thought that was really cool. Seeing the crystallized gold nanoparticles with the iron phosphate was actually more interesting for me than seeing the actual batteries work, probably because I was just kind of expecting them to work.

The final highlight of module 3 for me, as I expect is the same for everyone, was the research proposal presentations. During the literature review while Colleen and I were deciding on our project idea, I came across several papers that, while I knew I wouldn’t be able to effectively synthesize into a good research proposal, were just incredibly interesting uses of science and reminded me of why I chose Course 20 in the first place - because there are just so many interesting things that happen in the field. It maybe would have been nice to have a little more of a break from working on the assignment after spending so much time the week before we began on the research paper for module 2, but 

With regards to our proposal specifically, I felt much more like an actual research scientist as Colleen and I were reading through papers on Alzheimer’s disease not only for results but also for methods - in fact, there were some papers that I read exclusively for the methods section. I think that’s the biggest distinction between reading just for the sake of learning how biology works and reading to learn how to use biology do something useful, with the intention of actually doing it.

I also found that Alzheimer’s disease, and just neuroscience in general, was much cooler than I was expecting - it might be pretty cool to take an actual neuroscience class as an extra elective later on. Too bad I’ve already filled my Courseroad because Course 20 has too many interesting classes already. Is it bad that I’m only a sophomore and already putting off classes until grad school?

I’m really grateful to all of the professors for giving us the opportunity to participate in their research, all of my classmates for coming up with really cool ideas for the research proposals, and, of course, the teaching faculty, for all the time they’ve put in to developing this masterpiece of a course that has been a much needed reminder for me of why I chose Course 20. Thanks for a great semester!

What is Life

Wait... we're actually done? Like for real?



Of course not, there's still a mini-report... but still we're done with all the big stuff, so that's pretty awesome.  At this point I can say the coolest thing I've made as a bio-engineer is a working battery out of a viruses (and if that doesn't get people to take bio-engineers seriously I don't know what will, because that's honestly the coolest thing ever).  But anyway, this whole class has just been dandy.  Really! I mean that with all seriousness that could be applied to a blog post I write at 3 AM (sorry, not sorry #nightperson)

In a world so full of new and innovative projects cropping up all the time, it's nice to see that even someone like me (and my lab partner) could come up with yet another new and innovative project.  It offers some very appreciated perspective on the daunting subject of the



and I'm sure everyone else feels the same way.  It's a long road to travel from making a potato battery for a high school science fair to actually making an impact on the science world; and, without the right kind of guidance, it's very easy to become discouraged.  But, thanks to the teaching staff of 20.109 and really everything we have at MIT, we get all the tools we need to really break down real-life problems, and solve them like real scientists.  Good job MIT, and good job 20.109, I couldn't be the student, researcher, and person that I am without you.

It's Been One Hell of a Ride

It feels really weird to be writing my last blog post of 20.109. I can still remember the first day of lecture when we went through all of the modules and all of the assignments on the syllabus. I was so excited to finally get to Module 3 (a little less excited about all the work that had to be done between those dates), and now we're pretty much done with everything - where does the time go?

Module 3 has been an absolute blast though - thanks in no small part to our amazing professor Angela Belcher. I know it sounds really cheesy to say, but listening to her talk about her life story and her inspiration for her research kind of reignited my passion for biological research. After all, who wouldn't be excited about making batteries from viruses and getting to look at ATOMS under a microscope?

Our batteries actually worked too! It's so cool to see what we did in lab actually get made into a tangible physical product (unlike most of bio research). There are so many cool pictures of the stuff we did in this mod (courtesy of Maxine and Professor Belcher), but I didn't want to overwhelm this blog post with only those.

The last really awesome part of 20.109 was creating our research proposals. I honestly had a lot of fun doing this - it made me feel like an actual researcher for a brief moment of time. It definitely was not easy to find something novel to work on, but after digging deep into the literature, there were so many ideas we had somewhat of a hard time just choosing one. At the end we decided to go with microbubbles and BNCT (both of which are magical combinations of biology and chemistry), and I am now thoroughly convinced that almost every biodelivery problem can be solved microbubbles.

The presentations themselves were part this:

But mostly this:

It was really cool to hear everyone's innovative ideas - I especially liked the ones that used existing biological machinery (for example from viruses or bacteria) to tackle an important issue. After all, evolution has had millions of years to develop this technology, so why compete when you can just co-opt it for your own purposes?

20.109 has overall been such an amazing experience, both in developing as a bioengineer and in just having a lot of fun and learning so many new things. If I could do it all over again, I definitely would. Shoutout to Professors Koehler, Samson, and Belcher as well as Maxine, Noreen, and Leslie for making this one of my most favorite classes at MIT! I think this probably best expresses how I feel about finishing the class at this point:

This is Sid, signing off for the last time - it's been a wild ride and I can't wait to see what the future of Course 20 holds!