methods
sgorman | September 16, 2015As most people in any empirical or scientific field know, the gold standard for experimenting and establishing causality is the randomized controlled trial (RCT). In an RCT, subjects are randomly assigned to one of two conditions: an experimental group or a control group. The experimental group receives the intervention or drug and the control group receives standard care or a placebo (basically, the equivalent of the status quo). The idea behind the randomized controlled trial is to control the circumstances surrounding the experimental question as much as possible. This allows researchers…
cagapakis | August 30, 2010Sometimes among all of the tedious protocols and mundane inconclusive data, I forget that I'm doing something amazing and incredibly powerful. Almost all my experiments require altering a living organism to do my bidding--to hold onto and replicate a piece of DNA that I'm interested in or to produce an enzyme that I want a lot of. Thanks to iGEM this summer I've gotten to learn some new soon-to-be-tedious protocols that seem absolutely thrilling now, and the experience is reminding me of how awesome (in the real sense of the word) genetic engineering is.
The team is working with the model…