3D Printing of bio material

[Tim OConnell]

This is amazing.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9244884/The_first_3D_printed_organ_a_liver_is_expected_in_2014

[Ish]

Excellent. I'm going to need a new liver someday, this is a way better option than regrowing my old one.

Why won't that link work? http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9244884/The_first_3D_printed_organ_a_liver_is_expected_in_2014

[SloopJonB]

Amazing stuff.

Wasn't it only yesterday that Replicators were merely Star Trek fantasy? How long until we have transporters and holodecks?

[BeauV]

Tim, I keep wondering if we'll start building library entries someplace of the way a person was at 18 years old, before most things started to go wrong, so we can replicate the worn out bits with the original when it was in good shape. All of this is both fascinating and a little eerrrrieeee. We may end up with replicants built from parts at some stage, something I'd rather not be around for. Thanks for posting this! BV

[JoeP]

Tim, I keep wondering if we'll start building library entries someplace of the way a person was at 18 years old, before most things started to go wrong, so we can replicate the worn out bits with the original when it was in good shape. All of this is both fascinating and a little eerrrrieeee. We may end up with replicants built from parts at some stage, something I'd rather not be around for. Thanks for posting this! BV

I think that wpuld be a step on the way to replicating an entire body and just transferring thought patterns, memory, etc. It is an intriguing idea, and one which raises many moral and ethical questions. Who would have thought 15 - 20 years ago we would even be considering these possibilities? Our children and our children's children will live in a wondrous (to us) age, if we don't blow ourselves up, or starve oirselves out first.

[Orestes Munn]

Tim, I keep wondering if we'll start building library entries someplace of the way a person was at 18 years old, before most things started to go wrong, so we can replicate the worn out bits with the original when it was in good shape. All of this is both fascinating and a little eerrrrieeee. We may end up with replicants built from parts at some stage, something I'd rather not be around for. Thanks for posting this! BV

I think that wpuld be a step on the way to replicating an entire body and just transferring thought patterns, memory, etc. It is an intriguing idea, and one which raises many moral and ethical questions. Who would have thought 15 - 20 years ago we would even be considering these possibilities? Our children and our children's children will live in a wondrous (to us) age, if we don't blow ourselves up, or starve oirselves out first.

I think this technique or something like it will almost certainly work at some point for simple organs, such as liver and skin. The hard part, as the article points out, is how to incorporate the components that aren't organized in repeating structures, e.g., blood vessels and nerves. Endothelial precursor cells will form new, functioning, blood vessels in days, by a well understood process and it sounds like they're on their way to a solution. Nerves, however, are not assembled "on site" and can only grow into a target at about a mm a day from cells in the spinal cord and only when supplied with a connective tissue structure to follow. Tough trick to pull off outside a body.

[JoeP]

Tough trick now, yes, but never say never. Brilliant minds will build upon the progress of others until bit by bit success is achieved. Isn't that the nature of human technological progress?

[Orestes Munn]

Tough trick now, yes, but never say never. Brilliant minds will build upon the progress of others until bit by bit success is achieved. Isn't that the nature of human technological progress?

I never said never. This is simple engineering and incomparably easier than dealing with the big, urgent, problem, i.e., managing human behavior.

[JoeP]

Yes, I agree, that is a much tougher and more important problem.

[SloopJonB]

We're getting there - it's been 3 generations since the last major shooting war (superpower against superpower). I think you have to search history pretty intently to find the last time we went that long between them - if we ever did.

A couple of decades ago I read that the total of human knowledge was doubling every 7 years. I'd say that has since accelerated. The TV show "How William Shatner Changed The World" was tongue in cheek but full of truth too. Things that were mere Star Trek fantasy when my kids were small is everyday stuff now - how different is a Bluetooth earpiece from Uhura's earpiece? Spock's data storage "cards" look downright clunky compared to flash drives - and that was supposed to be 200 years in the future.

When you think about how things were 50 years ago and look at them now - we can't even imagine what the next 50 will bring

[BeauV]

I have found technology progress to be a much more like watching water fill up a canyon behind a dam when you don't have a topo map than watching the tide rise up 90 Mile Beach in New Zealand.

Our technological progress as been erratic and spotty, with massive progress made in some areas quite quickly and very little progress made in others. All too often folks in the general press will talk about the various "technologies" as if they were similar in nature and rate of change when in fact they are quite different.

As we've learned to manipulate silicon based structures, we've made amazing progress at miniaturizing and replicating a very simple element; we really understood the math that supported such structures long before we could build them, as a partial accident of alignment between logic, math and physics; but it is only now that we're just starting to experiment with adaptive and self correcting or healing designs which stray (quite wildly) from the trivial math that drove our prior architectures. The evolution of computers that do something that is erroneously called Neural Networks will be much much slower than our simple binary machines have been.

As someone without personal knowledge of the mechanics/physics behind our manipulation of carbon based structures, I have no idea how to estimate the rate of progress. Without a known mathematical model upon which to based the structures we're contemplating building, I have grave doubts that we'll get anything like what the general press believes we'll get. OM's focus on our difficulty with constructing the irregular features, as opposed to the regular repetitive features, is interesting as it is a direct analogy to some of the biggest problems with Silicon structures. For decades we've known how to build very dense and complex regular structures within computers and struggled tremendously to build the input/output structures that could feed information into and extract it from those regular structures. Things like the Shannon-Hartley theorem (which describes information density in a communications medium - [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon–Hartley_theorem[/url]) have become far more important than Moore's Law (which really isn't a law anyway but is more of an observation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law).

I believe that we've only a partial and highly over-simplified view of how the human body works. We have yet to understand how complex the problem of making humans is, let alone how to replicate it in some way artificially. We stuck with the normal highly entertaining way

[Ish]

For a look at where all this could lead, check out John Varley's book The Persistence of Vision. Very well thought-through science fiction examination of what would be possible with printed/grown technology, published in 1978.