Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Produce Organs...From Printer

Posted by Hemos on from the haul-out-your-old-inkjets dept.

Gavinsblog writes "New Scientist reports that researchers have modified desktop printers and filled them with suspensions of cells instead of ink. Apparently the work is a first step towards printing complex tissues or even entire organs. Amazing technology. " Well, I guess this could give a whole new meaning to "watermarking".

19 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmmm.... by nano2nd · · Score: 4, Funny

    So how long till I can print out a nice fillet steak?..........

    --
    G4 Hackintosh
  2. print organs? NO! print organisms! by grimani · · Score: 4, Funny

    i'd print myself a girl.

  3. And in other news by gowen · · Score: 3, Funny

    Scientists today reported methods on how to store small quantities of ink in feathers (that they have named "quills") in order for writing. They claim this is the first step to mass producing multi-colour documents and distributing them over the internet.

    i.e. a nice first step, but -- to be frank -- an unfeasible distance from their lofty goals.

    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
    1. Re:And in other news by Negatyfus · · Score: 5, Funny

      4-Winged Dinosaur Fossil Printed

      In an astounding accomplishment this week, scientists from China have printed the fossilized remains of a 4-winged dinosaur on a standard desktop printer. This achievement could go a long way in providing more evidence that, in fact, Creation was done on an old 24-pin matrix printer, which could explain away the various inconsistencies in the end result we see today.

      "There may have been driver problems in the first test-prints of Creation, bugs in the software that make the printer work, that God may have overlooked," says evolutionary theorist Dr. Winston Guystone. "Of course this is met with a lot of opposition, prominently from the religious quarters, who strongly believe God is omnipotent."

      Rev. Dr. Edward Martins of the Baptist Church of Redemption, responds, "It is absolutely ludicrous to think that the universe was printed from some divine desktop printer. And even so, where does the paper come from?" Lately the Protestant and Catholic church have been in an uproar when it came out that the Holy Bible was, in fact, based on an ancient Roman website that was run from a recently discovered modified Commodore 64 server with a custom network device.

  4. imagine the spam by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    "refill toner cartridges! Print yourself a new 12 inch organ, guaranteed!"

  5. a new paradox is born by circletimessquare · · Score: 3, Funny

    and ye, a new paradoxical quandry is born:

    which came first, the printer repairman or the printer?

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  6. Re:The ink by mini_me · · Score: 3, Informative

    Opps, messed up the link.

  7. And you thought... by Docta · · Score: 4, Funny

    You thought that printer cartridges were expensive beforehand! Imagine what they'll be like with black, 3 colours and a "cell" cartridge.

  8. Wow, The Onion was right by icantblvitsnotbutter · · Score: 5, Funny
    You just know technology's getting scary when The Onion is accurate (oddly, this same link was used recently in another Slashdot post).

    Mexican Scientists Perfect Copying

    It may also be possible, some medical practitioners believe, to use copies to save lives on the operating table. A copy could be made of a kidney dialysis patient's good kidney, and then the copy could be inserted into the patient's body cavity, replacing the bad kidney.


  9. Eeeeeeuuuuu! by Inflatable+Hippo · · Score: 3, Funny

    > Apparently the work is a first step towards printing complex tissues or even entire organs.

    Imagine clearing out the jams in your flesh jet...

  10. DMCA already called into action... by MosesJones · · Score: 5, Funny

    In a land-mark case Lexmark are invoking the DMCA against the pregnant women.

    "We produce organs, so apparently do pregnant women, clearly they have reverse engineered our technology in breach of the DMCA. As normally with copyright violations this is biggest in China, India and other countries with large populations"

    Pregnant Women have filed a class-action countersuit claiming prior art, but are not expect to win as they didn't give any cash to elected officials.

    Senator Joe Bung(R) said "I know my mother doesn't agree with this case but the fact is she broke the DMCA when she had me, I'd much of prefered to have been printed out and it would have been easier for ma, women must realise that this is a natural thing and we must let the market decide."

    --
    An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
    1. Re:DMCA already called into action... by fr2asbury · · Score: 3, Funny

      I thought something very similar when I read this, but I was thinking Lexmark was going to sue the scientists for using modified cartridges in the printers.

      Jonathan

  11. Re:print organs? NO! print organisms! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    The worst is, I misread and thought for a second you wanted to print orgasms....

  12. Insightful message... by heytal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why is it that all the responses to this story are Funny and there are no Insightful or Interesting responses ?

    Does this show the /. mentality ?

  13. beyond the jokes by lingqi · · Score: 5, Funny

    Can I print an organ that is disproportional (no I am not thinking about penises) to what normally comes out?

    like, say, would I be able to print a sphere of kidney cells?
    how about a longer stretch of arm-muscles?
    attached to a printed, longer leg-bone?
    can I print a new layer of skin, or new hair folicles? (can you imagine rogain all up on this stuff?)
    how about a third leg?
    in fact, how about a beak?
    a gill so I can swim underwater? (i mean, as long as the blood circulates through it)

    the possibilities are endless, marvellous, and scary.

    --

    My life in the land of the rising sun.

  14. Only organs so far by Isle · · Score: 3, Funny

    So far they can only print organs, so no girl printing..

    But you can print yourself girl organs!

    hmm....

  15. Re:print organs? NO! print organisms! by giel · · Score: 4, Funny

    $ prn < hottie.3ds
    error: Printer on fire!

    --
    giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
  16. Differentiation by sam_handelman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Jamming the cells into the proper position works with cartilege - you can sculpt an "ear" out of cartilege and surgically implant it in someone's body, if there ear was cut off.

    However, more complex tissues require cell differentiation on a microscopic level.

    For example, your inner ear - the part of your ear that you use to hear - cannot be simply sculpted.

    Individual cells must diversify so as to play the proper role in the function of the organ; the nerve cells attached to the little hairs all have to be wired up properly and in the correct direction. This is true of all the organs you might wish to make. Actually, I'm not certain about the liver - all hepatocytes (liver cells) are pretty much the same, IIRC.

    There are cells in the kidney which exist to move salt out of the blood and into the urine (several different types of cells are involved, actually). They are epithelial cells. However, you cannot assemble a kidney out of epithelial cells; it won't work! The epithelial cells need to know - that is to say, they need to recieve chemical signals which indicate:
    a) That this epithelial cell is supposed to play a given role in salt transport (most cells don't make the proteins used in this process.)
    b) Which SIDE of the epithelial cell the blood is going to be traveling past and which SIDE of the cell the pre-urine is going to be on. In the living organism the blood may carry this signal (the nature of the signal is probably unknown) but you couldn't duplicate that with a printer.

    Stuffing epithelial cells (or even epithelial stem cells) into the overall shape of a kidney does not produce the chemical signals that trigger these differentiation events (when a "generic" epithelial cell - a variety of stem cell - becomes a kidney epithelial cell, it is called "differentiation".) In addition to various ions (Salt,) the kidney has dedicated mechanisms for dealing with dozens of other classes of chemicals.

    It is POSSIBLE that such a simulated organ might spontaneously arrange itself into a functioning kidney when blood was pumped through the correct portions.

    You might be able to help it along with chemical signals from a real kidney, somehow, or synthetic signals you add yourself.

    However, personally, I doubt that either of these strategies is going to work.

    --
    The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
  17. Lots of cell types = organ by panurge · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Of course even apparently simple organs need lots of cell types - the liver needs blood vessels as well as the various types of liver cells, and even skin consists of multiple layers with different properties.And making anything which needs structural properties could be a problem - cells that need to intertwine, like muscle and bone. Not really a case for even a hexachrome cartridge.

    But the concept is really interesting for doing things like creating little insulin producing nodes for diabetics.

    Or perhaps little skin-graft packages with a cell mix that would attach to the substrate and then align themselves. Or perhaps producing really effective animal-testing substitutes.

    A few years back I spent a little time on a manufacturing think-tank. The one thing everybody agreed was needed was a device that produced objects at their final net shape with no intermediate finishing stages. An inkjet printer basically does that already in two dimensions, and it's additive. It's surely potentially much nearer-term for all sorts of things than (say) exotic silicon micro-machining, and much more process-granular.

    I wonder if - no, where - someone is trying to develop an inkjet printer that produces sintered metal shapes?

    --
    Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.