Screenshot via YouTube
One way or another, technologists seem determined to recreate the human being. While computer engineers and neuroscientists put their heads together to try to simulate the brain, biologists and makers are teaming up to 3D print the body.
It's been possible to print out parts of the body for years now, but now scientists are edging closer to being able to create regenerative, living cells—in other words, a liver or heart that is fully functioning, that humans can actually use.
This week, scientists at St Vincent’s Hospital in Australia got one step closer to this goal when they successfully "grew" cartilage from stem cells. They created custom equipment to better insert live cells inside a 3D-printed structure. “We are trying to create a tissue environment that can ‘self-repair’ over many years," wrote lead researcher Gordon Wallace.
Eventually, the idea is to use stem cells from patients' own bodies to print and grow all kinds of inner body parts—muscles, fat, bone, arteries, and tendons. Within a few years, it could be possible to develop custom-made printed human organs, researchers say.
“Getting to a whole organ-in-a-box that’s plug-and-play and ready to go, I believe that could happen in my lifetime,” Sharon Presnell, CTO of Organovo, recently told Popular Science.
Fully functional, made-to-order organs is seriously mind-boggling to think about. Not only could the process potentially save the lives of the 118,000 people currently on the national donor waiting list, it could conceivably extend the lifespan of thousands more. But printing the human body is no easy task.
For one, you can't exactly instantly scan and create a blueprint of our insides. Also, the right ink and the correct arrangement of cells doesn't automatically give you a live organ, as Cornell engineer Hod Lipson told PopSci. “You can put the cells of a heart tissue in the right place together, but where’s the start button?”
Scientists are working toward printing organs that are 100 percent living tissue, and can assemble themselves. The trick is not to print out cells in their final position, but at a starting point where they can then form into place on their own. Some scientists think a beating heart, 3D printed from a person's own stem cells, could be just 10 years off. What's next, printing entire humans?
Bioprinting is making it possible to not just recreate the body, but improve it—promising a future of cyborg-like superhuman abilities.
This week researchers at Tel Aviv University revealed a new-and-improved process for printing tiny biocompatible electronics—tiny machines implanted in the human body. As these devices get safer and more comfortable, we get closer to bionic "smart" limbs that can do the same tasks a smartphone or computer can do.
It's a good time to be in the cybernetics game. "This field is like Legos for grownup," wrote Leeya Engel, one of the Tel Aviv researchers. "It stretches both the imagination and the limits of technology."
We got a taste of the future a few months ago when researchers at Princeton 3D-printed a hearing bionic ear, which can restore hearing for the deaf and even pick up radio signals. It looks just like a human ear, but with wires coming out of it that attach to nerve endings.
Living organs, bioelectric smart limbs—cyborgs and superhumans might not be the stuff of sci-fi much longer. At this rate, 3D printing could be the best thing to happen to transhumanists in years.