Inkjet Printer Prints out Human Skin

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday January 20, 2005 @11:45AM from the tattoos-made-easy dept.

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?"

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Molding or creation ? by cyberfunk2 · 2005-01-20 11:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

"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.