Manasa Thimmiya

DAY 1

If i've ever had a reason to stay out of school it would be because of the same old monotonous classes i'd have to attend. Well I've had my share of running away. Now it's time to stay. I've always liked biology, chemistry and math maybe even a little more than arts. For the past one year I have been an art student at Srishti, I like it, a lot. But, there seems to be something missing, it feels incomplete. Maybe it was the fact that I didn't get the chance to go ahead with the "sciences". Then came this opportunity of doing something different. Synthetic biology. We read up about synthetic biology, DNA, genes, protiens and at that point I realized that all I learnt at school wasn't all that useless. Everything was coming back to me. We were told that we had to work on E-coli. My research for that day had to revolve around it. My day ended with brainstorming and coming up with new ideas. In what way could we modify an organism to do something? That, being the question of the day. At the end I came up with the idea of cloth regenerating bacteria. My other idea was to work a body to function like a thermostat in order to adjust to the environment.

DAY 2

The excitement hasn't gone down. Everyone was talking about how we're back to research and taking down notes. True. Our second day started with sharing our ideas and it was exciting. Some ideas were really nice and got me thinking. So I researched some more, this time it started of with aquatic life and moved from jelly fish to aerosols to nano technology. Anything seemed to interest me. I was no longer happy with the cloth regeneration idea. It was time for a new idea. The first task of the day was to familiarize ourselves with BIOBRICKS. It was really nice. It's almost like everything is programmed, like in a computer. The next thing we did was extracting our DNA. Well it was nice that i got to 'see' my DNA. The entire process ended with a ritualistic disposal of our DNA. I chose to drain it out on rocks. It excited me how something that represented life dissappeared among something lifeless, showing that life might not even be as important as we percieve it to be. Maybe it's just like how the earth might be once the "world ends", nothing will remain but lifeless matter.