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

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.

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.