There’s a YouTube channel I like called Brick Technology. The videos are simple: a machine made from LEGOs must conquer an obstacle, like a wall, moat, or soapy ramp. When the machine inevitably fails, an engineer (always offscreen) modifies it to overcome the obstacle. Then, the obstacle gets bigger, and the engineering must continue. This happens again and again. The walls get bigger, the moats get wider, and the machines keep evolving in iterative loops. It is addicting to watch.

The Brick Technology vehicle

In one video, a LEGO car is engineered to scale a wall. At first, the wall is only two bricks high; the car climbs it easily. Then the wall goes up to 25 bricks, and the car is affixed to a ladder. Using an electronic motor, it throws this ladder against the wall and pulls itself up the rungs. Then the wall goes to 50 bricks (or 55, or 60; too many to count on-screen) and even the ladder now falls short. The engineer mounts a propeller on top of the car, but the battery can’t generate enough lift. So they add a grappling hook instead. This LEGO car, now mounted with cannon, shoots the hook up and over the wall. The hook sticks, and the car pulls itself up at a 90 degree angle. All of this happens in the span of nine minutes.

Why LEGOs? My guess is because they are easy to move around, to assemble and disassemble. Bricks can be snapped, changed, replaced. It’s much faster to iterate with plastic bricks than metal pieces, and faster still to iterate with metal than, say, a living organism. (Everything I write is ultimately about biology, isn’t it? Surely you didn’t think this was actually about LEGOs…)

This YouTube channel got me thinking about fast iterations and the sense of accomplishment we feel upon finding solutions to a difficult problem. The feeling is addicting, not only for scientists but for little kids, too. At the start of any given Brick Technology video, it’s hard to imagine how a little machine, so humble at first, could possibly be modified to scale a towering wall. And yet, by video’s end, it has. Each iteration, every change, every solution is recorded and made visible. The fast cycles of trial and error are mesmerizing. The car scales the wall.

Kids seem to like LEGOs and computers because these things move quickly. The kids can iterate upon ideas, try stuff that doesn’t work, and learn from failures in a few minutes. But in biology, everything takes too long. Cloning a single gene takes about a week, and we rarely disclose our failures and iterations; papers merely report the final solutions. Everything in biology is portrayed as a clear “story,” with all five figures neatly planned out months in advance (and no failed experiments, of course.)

Just because biology is slow and opaque, though, doesn’t mean we can’t emulate faster fields; if not in practice, then at least in educational terms. I’d like to see a YouTube channel that recreates Brick Technology for biology. After all, this YouTube channel is the encapsulation of what biology research actually is! All a bioengineer is really doing is asking a question and seeking a solution. We start with a goal, like “engineer a gene circuit to make cells flash in oscillating patterns of green and red,” and begin building towards it. Most experiments end in failure: the cells don’t flash at all, or they only flash green, or everything is dead. But I think it’d be wonderful to watch a video where a scientist sets such a challenge, tries and fails to solve it, records everything, and explains how each iteration is made. Imagine how good it would feel, as a viewer, to see those engineered cells at the end, beautifully flashing. It would be addicting as hell to watch, too; a vision of the future made tangible, approachable, common.