Inkjet Printer Prints out Human Skin

Anonymous Award writes "Scientists at the University of Manchester in the UK have developed a type of inkjet printer that can print human cells. The scientists claim that it will be possible to print 'made-to-measure' tissue and bones to be grown simply by inputting their dimensions into a computer. But that's not all, the printer's creator claims that the potential of his team's discovery is enormous: 'You could print the scaffolding to create an organ in a day,' well, one day maybe. Where could this technology lead in a 100 years I wonder? Could it lead to a fax machine for complete living organisms?"

Comments

Fifth Element

[Doofus]

Visions of the body reconstruction machine from The Fifth Element...

Molding or creation ?

[cyberfunk2]

"Team leader Professor Brian Derby says that they are the only team in the world to work out how to print human cells without destroying them in the process."

So, does this mean they're taking skin cells that are already created en masse from cell culturing and reshaping them? I mean, I assume they're not just "printing" new actual cells, right ? The article seems a little vague on this point.

fingerprint security

[mrcubehead]

Will fingerprint security will need to be revised?

Re:Beam Me Up, Mr. Scot

[Coryoth]

This was one of the theories exlained to me, years ago in a physics class on how matter transportation may be accomplished...reconstructing by layers.

The downside was you had to be destroyed to find out what you were made of in order to reassemble you.

Don't worry, any research into such things will be rapidly banned in the US I would expect. Anything that involves the construction of a living organism from base matter in anything other than the "church approved" manner is going to find itself in difficulty given the way things are going in the US.

I'm not complaining about the church approved method for constructing organisms of course, I enjoy it myself from time to time, even if the organism construction usually doesn't take. On the other hand, I don't see a problem with trying to figure out how matter and organisms work, and trying for soem artificial (and more consistently reproducible) methods for the same.

Jedidiah.

Fax Myself to Mars

[queenb**ch]

This presents several interesting questions:

1) Will I be able to fax myself to Mars?

2) Will the me on Mars be a duplicate/clone or will it be me?

3) Won't cloning be obsolete? Why bother cloning yourself when you can just make a "photocopy" that pops out of the printer.

4) How do you decide who is the "real" person? I mean what if I need part of a spinal cord or some other item that has to be harvested from a fully developed "me"?

2 cents,

Queen B

If they can make this work

[multiplexo]

it will be a huge advance. Right now if you get 3rd degree burns over 40 percent of your body you're basically dead as their isn't enough skin on the rest of your body to graft to the parts of your body that are burned. So since your skin is your primary barrier against infection you generally get an infection and die.

Another problem with skin grafts is that they motherfucking hurt! Jesus H. God do they motherfucking hurt! I spent eight weeks in a hospital in 2003 and ended up with about 200 square inches of donor site and goddamnit it hurt! I ended up having my left leg amputated below the knee because it had been crushed and my tibia and fibula were broken in three places and even after that I'd have to say that the skin grafts were the most painful thing that happened to me. Any surgical procedure where the doctor describes it as "We take this device called a dermatome, which looks like a rotary cheese grater, and run it back and forth over the donor site to harvest a thin layer of skin" is not going to be any fun to go through and afterwards the donor sites are red and raw like a serious case of road rash.

If they could print up enough skin, quickly enough it would be a huge, huge, huge advance. I wish them the best of luck.

but bad commenting

[loose canons]

In another life, I had a hell of time moding these comments. I RTFA...which was seriously light on details though definitely /.-worthy...and searched nearly in vain for any critical comments or input from the medically informed. About all I found were two posters who underscored the importance of the development because they know what skin grafting is like and a few who knew of some state-side precedents for using ink jets to apply tissue or cell components. But most commenting is either spam, porn, transporter or fax jokes. Why didn't somebody say:

• "...100 years.." Gimme a break! We don't know what is going to happen in the next 10 years...Why not just write: "this is an incremental break through in reconstructive surgery but it won't be interesting to /. readers unless we set a timeframe that invites sloppy science fiction discussion "
• "Could it lead to a fax machine for complete living organisms?"Goofy speculation insanely beyond the already dubious speculation in the art. [researcher quoted in TFA:"...we aren't there yet" was speaking of scaffolds for organs, i.e. connective tissue only not whole organs] did poster RTFA?
• I only saw a few informed comments well down from the top about what medical techniques are needed to compliment and make the potential of the tissue printer viable
• Since when is the 5th or 10th repeat of "I'll fax my fanny to the whitehouse" worthy of anything but REDUNDANT?
• if you just HAVE to talk about transporters as if they were the very next step beyond a system that harvests a certain cell type, ferments up a batch of those cells suspended in a fluid that keeps em alive as they are shot out a nozzle...then why not address the minor difficulty of sampling every kind of tissue you have [ brain cells with many specializations and perhaps as much of their critical functionality in the physiology of their synaptic connections as in their cellular chemistry may not even be the hardest to get right] and getting ALL of them to mass produce themselves in the same large ratio? Wouldn't it be more likely and less painful to suppose that in the future, MRI resolution could be got down to the cellular level? [and MRI also reports chemical activity for some atoms and some reactions] The easiest requirement for such a system that we could project meeting in the future might be the data capacity to almost simultaneously encode and transmit the exact location and orientation of the gazillions of cells in a living organism.

I am always wary of the mention of "soul" in a /. discussion but this time the comments about the unreality of the faxing-the-living notion, couched in terms that force you to think about which cell carries the soul out the nozzle of the printer were at least intuitively right on. Whole organism re-assembly on a cellular level is bunk. You'd have to start by freezing the critter to 0 degrees K so no life processes got interrupted and the locale of each cell would be constant long enough to [a] know exactly where it was so you could [b] put it back exactly where it belonged...the damn things wiggle like crazy in living tissue! and yes, its neigh impossible to keep some something at absolute zero in any circumstance, let alone while microtoming it cell from cell. [except bone and some connective tissue but thats where the article ended]