No More Waking Up in a Bathtub Full of Ice

basically exactly what it sounds like. The way you print a document today is you get an image of what that document would look like on your computer and that's digitally rendered. It's sent to the printer, and then the printer creates that in the real world with ink on a page. Now, of course that's basically for all intensive purposes two dimensional. Extend that another dimension. Now you have a machine that takes a digital model and it creates

a three dimensional object. So this is what we would call additive manufacturing. So you can take any kind of multiple material like plastic or glass or metal, and you can create an object with a printer that lays on tiny layers, one little bit at a time to create any object. You can design in a digital way. Cool. Yeah, and this is used in a lot of different fields, including in manufacturing. A lot of prototypes are made this

way because, uh, you know prototypes. Traditionally, the way that people would make a prototype model of a product would be to take some sort of material and carve away at it until you reach whatever you know your destination product is. Hence additive manufacturing instead of subtractive exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly, because you're subtracting material to get to what you want.

But with three D printing, you're you're just adding what is needed, so there's there's not really you don't have that problem of waste like you would if you were carving or melting stuff way. So here's an even cooler thing that we could do with three D printing. Though of course you can make a chess piece or an action figure. Those are both on my list, right, What if you could make a kidney or a liver so like, and you're talking not for dinner, but for actual medical

purposes in an organ that works. That that is phenomenal and there are people who are working on that. Yeah, it's actually hypothetically not all that very far off. Researchers have just recently created the first the first live human well they're they're working towards the first live human tissue. They've created a three D printer that instead of using ink or plastic or or whatever else you would put in a printer, it deals out these droplets of embryonic

human stem cells um in a nutrient soup. And it does this so gently and so precisely that the cells remain living and remain capable of developing two different cell types. So what you could do is, by using these stem cells and using the appropriate type of tissue, you could print them in such a formation as to create an organ. I mean, that's that's kind of like the the goal we're talking about the end right now. They're basically just just printing little layers of soup and saying the soup

could become something someday. Layers of soup. That's that sounds like a great name for a band, not a Frank's Apple album, It might very well be. You know, kids, ask your parents the yeah, this is this is some really cool applications here. Well, yeah, they already think they can do some really amazing things with this. Just one example is, um imagine, there's a burn victim who has

lots of cellular damage all over the surface of the body. Um. Now, in some cases, if the burns are small enough, you could get skin grafts that helped cover up the burned areas. But imagine if there are a lot of burns that there's you know, you can't cover it with skin grafts. Well, you could print with a with a medical three D printer, you could print a layer of cells to go over the burned areas that could help help the wound heal faster and help prevent infection and contend disease. Yeah, and

that's incredibly important with burns. Infection is one of those things that can make a serious condition a critical condition. Uh. And that's true for any major injury. And in fact, I was reading about potential Actually I wasn't reading. I

was watching. There was a great video a TED talk by Anthony Atala and this dates back to two thousand eleven when he was talking about a potential new technology that what it would do is scan someone who has suffered a wound and then after scanning the wound would immediately start to print repairs to the body. So that could be tissue everything from from muscle tissue to ligaments, to bone, to even to skin, so that it would

be a multi pass system. The first pass would be the scan, the next pass would be printing, and it would probably scan and print, scan and print, and you would he wounds incredibly rapidly, not quite so fast as in the series that we all love, Star Trek. It's not quite a trick quarter yet, not not yet, but

it's it's that's a phenomenal idea. And and beyond that, there's the idea of just printing out a replacement organ based upon the patient's cells, so that the organ has a high does not have as higher risk of being rejected by the body. So that's something we all know about. You know, you in order to get a transplant these days, you have to have an organ donor, and that donor

has to be compatible with the patient. By printing, you could print out an organ that's already compatible with the patient, and that reduces the chance the body will reject the organ. You're never going to reduce that chance to zero, at least not based on our understanding of how the human body works right now, but you could definitely impact it. And all of this is pretty far off. I mean, like I said, they're right now using embryonic human stem cells.

If we could move into using peripotent stem cells from made from adult sure adult stem cells. Where it's the issue here is that embryonic stem cells have the opportunity to develop into lots of different kinds of tissue. Adults stem cells tend to be more already a little specialized that they're limited in what kind of tissues they can become based upon our most of our applications right now, but this would give us many more options right when

we're when we need to pronoup material. Also, I should point out that three D printers can work in biomedical materials, not just actual human tissue. They've been practicing with using different artificial human tissue right that can that can be printed out and then using a very focused laser zapped into into an appropriate form to form for example, of

blood vessel. And this this is incredible stuff. It's also very tricky because there are only so many materials that you can introduce to a human system without the risk of action or rejection. But one application outside the human body, of course, would be research. Sure, Yeah, if you could manufacture organs that you could do research on without endangering actual human tissue that's attached to somebody or a cute, fuzzy, funny rabbit or yeah, yeah you could. You're having to

take it from yeah yeah. I think about think about pharmaceutical tests where grant. This raises up a lot of ethical questions. You know, I'm sure people would ask is it ethical to create artificial you're creating real organs using this three D printing technique. Actually, if you used any technique to do this, but three D printing is the one we're concentrating on. Um if you were to create those organs, is it ethical to be able to do these sort of tests? From my perspective, I I tend

to think yes. I think that's far more ethical than having to ask for a volunteer population or to take animals which have no ability to consent to the sort of test testing, and to think like, Okay, well we've developed, for instance, we've developed a new drug that's meant to fight off a Shuler disease, but we don't know how it would affect healthy tissue. This would be a way of being able to do those tests in a manner that's not going to put at risk the life of

an actual person, so it could be incredibly effective. Also, I think it's important to remember that for us to reach that amazing future where we have the six million dollar man, uh, not all of those parts need to be robotic in nature. We can create bigger, faster, stronger organs because we'll have the technology. No way, I just want a stomach that lets me eat ghost peppers without

feeling badly afterwards, because I loves the spicy. But you know, hey, the show is not all about how does Jonathan take future technologies and bend them to his own will? No, it kind of is really okay alright, so no, I definitely want that. But seriously though that the the potential

benefits here are phenomenal. It means that we could get to a point where there won't be a place for you to put on your driver's license that you're an organ donor because it's not necessary, which would be a wonderful world to live in where people who have a desperate need for an organ transplant aren't in a waiting game where they have no idea when, if ever they will receive an oregan right and hopefully eliminate an organ

black market all of that kind of scary territory. Sure. Yeah, I mean if we're talking about something that is widely distributed in particular, then you have eliminated an entire uh possible black market. You know, you've reduced the risk of of people being forcibly uh submitted to organ transplants. For the TV will have no more jokes about bathtubs. Full advice that would be do we want to live in

that world where we don't have that joke? That's okay because we have other jokes like aren't you glad you didn't turn on the light? Those police procedural There's also the you know, the the hook that's hanging from the door handle. There are plenty of other urban legends that we can really concentrate. True, the next generation of prosthetics

could make that story history too, that's true. Well, you know what, I'm confident that our futuristic world will generate all new urban legends for us to to really focus on. You know, but yeah, you'll have the I don't know what the robot hanging off the exactly he has the robotic arm and thinking that law, the crazed robot that roams the hills. Oh man, I look forward to telling that urban legend around a digital campfires one day. But yeah, yeah, this is getting back to the three D printing in

the human tissue to get a little more serious. This is something that I am really genuinely excited about. It's this thought of of being able to to really improve the health conditions of people who desperately need it. And of course we're all starting to live longer. I mean our our our health has improved over time so that our lifespans have extended quite a bit, and that means that there are more opportunities for things to fail. So more and more of us are going to be in

an experience where something like this might be necessary. So to see this technology starting to blossom today and know that within you know, a generation or two, it may be sophisticated enough where an Oregon donor is something that just you you've only heard about in you know, history text history textbooks or visiting me in the old folks home when I sit there and talk about the the old days when you had to wait for a donor. Um. So I'm I'm genuinely excited about this and I can't

wait to see how it continues. And uh, and so that wraps up our discussion here on three D printing and human tissue. We've got so much more to say, guys, make sure you visit our website. It's forward thinking dot Com,

that's f w thinking dot Com. We take these topics and we really break them down in video format, in the audio podcast and blog posts, and we really want to hear from you and what you are interested in and the sort of things that gets you excited about the future, because this really needs to be a conversation. So make sure you join us and we will talk to you again really soon. We're more on this topic and the future of technology. Visit forward thinking dot Com

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