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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?"
If you can't afford this skin surgery, you can always get sponsorship from companies like Intel and let the printer print a non-removable "Intel Outside" on your new skin.
This guy is going to get so excited.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
So you're saying that I can print a new liver? Sweet! *breaks out a 6-pack*
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
Now all we need to do is figure out how to bombard a body with slightly greasy solar atoms.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
"Where could this technology lead in a 100 years I wonder?"
I don't know... lets see now... How about printer vendors selling toner cartridges for arms and legs for an arm and a leg?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Visions of the body reconstruction machine from The Fifth Element...
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
"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.
Free Mac Mini
Obviously the local gag at the lab is printing out a huge penis on your coworker's printer. Literally.
I'm sure that owners of these printers will have to pay a heck of a lot for small refill cartridges. Probably almost as much as they pay for ink for their regular printers. :-)
This gives photocopying your bum a disturbing new dimension ...
Hey look this fax's header is "ebola" oh #$@!
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
*actually* fax my ass! Who first...? :)
This sort of new printer technology always comes up... and fades away again. Remember printers that print "smells" a few years back? What about those 3d-object printers. Sure, they're used in labs somewhere, but when will these things become commercially viable and available?
I think so, Brain, but where are we going to get 40 cheerleaders and a vat of Cheez-Whiz?
NARF!
</PINKY>
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
When the paper jams in THAT printer.. yikes!
Meet new people, and kill them.
Or the spam industry!
"Print your new, longer pen1s today! No need for vi4gra! Download the new 12 inch model today!"
However i fear the nozzle will get clogged half-way through.
I sure hope so. I'd hate to have an emergency skin graft and get some elbow skin on my forehead...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
No.
Good to hear. I wasn't looking forward to the fax spam we'd start getting. It would be funny, though, to come into the office in the morning and have a bunch of freshly printed salesmen locked in the fax room.
"...Engineering Laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina, is one of the scientists who has rigged Hewlett-Packard and Canon inkjet printers to shoot out proteins instead of ink, and to capture tissue on specialized gel instead of paper. Older printers work well because their spray nozzles have larger holes and are less likely to damage fragile cells. It would be great to have a use for these old printers instead of searching for a place to recycle them safely..." Link
Funk
Does that mean you've only seen the comedy central version of the movie?
c'mon, say it with me. Fuck. Fuck fuckedee fuck-fuck fuck. Sheeeit.
Karnal
Will fingerprint security will need to be revised?
That's funny you immediately thought about getting a new pen1s. I for one thought about printing out different types of girls.
This is great news in making the reconstruction of tissue cheaper and more reliable through automation. The main enabling tech here is the phase of the process where patient skin cells are harvested, multiplied, and returned to them. They don't necessarily have to wait in a hospital while that labwork is performed. These kinds of autologous donations, donating tissue to oneself, can become much more common.
Personal bloodbank accounts should already be the norm, with risky behaviors insured only when blood is stored; the bank can charge "interest", putting some of the collected blood into the pool, along with aging blood in the accounts. That kind of preemptive storage will be prudent in general, when larger scale economics bring prices down. So I'd put some liver and kidney tissue in the bank when I started drinking, and start growing a replacement when a medical exam showed my original organ on the way out. Sperm or possibly egg cells might turn out to be a good source of stemcells to keep "on file", a hedge against later tumors or other disease/damage.
A lot of the anticipated benefits of "cloning" will be delivered by autologous donation. Most of the tech is already available, for several organs. This inkjet system will harness all that momentum, and perhaps make it available (and affordable) for much less serious health crises. Their combination has the potential to change injuries and disease from crises to mere problems.
--
make install -not war
You'll never get cirrhosis with a half-assed effort like that. Grab a case at least.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
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.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
They cut the burned tissue off with a long thin sharp knife with a depth gauge. It's just like watching the guy at the Greek deli cut strips off the lamb for a Gyro. Once they've got down to viable tissue, they wrap you up, staple the bandages on (yes right into your flesh like a band flyer on a phone pole)
Then they take this skin shaver and grind little sheets off your ass. Oh, unless of course you really got burned bad, and your ass is toast too. Then hopefully someone who died recently was nice enough to allow skin to be harvested off their dead ass. The skin is then run through this expander thing, that cuts a fishnet pattern into it. This fishnet flesh is then draped over the raw meat and it slowly (and painfully) grows back together.
Now imagine the doctor in the burn center prints off some custom fit sheets of skin for your raw meat. No extra hurts and scars on your already way wounded body. And maybe a reduced chance of infection with the graft. I hope they can make something workable out of this.
I bet the cartridges cost an arm and a leg.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
But there is some serious change in the wind from this kind of tech.
Just printing tissue could be huge. Not just for medicine. But how about you start printing Big macs. No more raising a cow. Just harvest some cells and start a culture farm that in turn prints out big mac patties based on muscle tissue of the approprite parts.
Print any kind of meat. Or other food matter. No mass salughter of animals any more or having to raise them on a massive scale.
Not against animals beint eaten.. Trust me I come from the
"I love animals. try to eat at least one a day"
School of thought. But this would be a boon for a country like Japan where they don't have room to raise large herds of livestock and have to import.
This would also alleviate alot the fears of things like Mad Cow disease. You could also print any kind of cellular matter. Print a healthy microwave dinner in animal shapes for kids in their favorit colors.
Food supplies no longer linked to harvest and weather but linked to energy and the ability to induce cell growth.
That is just one possibility in addition to the cloning and organ possibilities. There was a bit in Pop Sci this month where someone has rigged a supply of cement as an 'ink' to a massive 'ink jet' head on a three D motion scaffolding to print buildings. Imagine a house complete with plumbing and electricity printed in a day or two.
Star Trek hypo sprays. Ink Jet Technology. Already asthma style inhalers with injet dispersal are being eyed as a medicine delivery method over shots and even the possibility of direct atomization in to the blood stream ala hypo spray.
Plastic fast prototyping technology. Print a cell phone cover, Comb, Toothbrush, ziplock bags and any number of other household common items. Slightly more complex would actually be able to print circut boards and buttons. Remote Controls, calculators. Even if the tech never made it to the home it can easily revolutionize manufacturing to an extent not seen since the industrial revolution. "Grandpa did people really used to sit on a assembly line all day long putting widgets together ???" The question there is only speed and economy of scale.
and not only that but the ability to alter the design on the fly without any major retooling. Man it is exciting. Course there is the issue of what the masses of factory workers would do if their jobs were largely eliminated.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Hell, man. Who needs the actual *girl*?
"What's the useless fleshy skin around a vagina called?"
"A Woman"
Where's the -100, Sexist bastard option?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I guess it doesn't need to put the lotion on its skin anymore...
and now back to the fallout shelter...
- "...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 aYou call that a troll? I have a whole beltway full of trolls better than that!
the ultimate test would be to print the girl from "weird science", preferably with a glandular disorder causing nymphomania
PRIOR ART! -God
This could be a great way to quickly produce needed vaccines on demand. I wonder how many phages per minute the first models will print...
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.