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Harvard Scientists Invent Cigarette-Smoking Robot For Better Lung Disease Research (ieee.org)
the_newsbeagle writes: Harvard scientists have invented a nifty lab robot that can smoke 10 cigarettes at a time, lighting up for the benefit of medical research on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The bot channels smoke into a "lung on a chip," a small device with microfluidic channels lined by human lung cells. This setup enables researchers to realistically replicate the action of taking regular pulls from a cigarette, and to watch the effects on the lung cells. Researchers can't achieve the same realism with cells cultured in a petri dish or with lab mice -- which, interestingly, are "obligate nasal breathers" that typically take in air through their noses. The invention was announced yesterday by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
It's not being used to prove that smoking is bad, it's being used to understand how smoking damages the airways, and probably will eventually be used to look for treatments to reverse it. Given the sheer number of cigarette smokers in the world despite the known dangers, that would be extremely profitable AND would reduce healthcare spending maybe. So, yes, there are new things to think about than is smoking bad, and they are thinking about them.